


Motorplex

by Charon_the_Sabercat



Category: Motorcity (Cartoon)
Genre: But if you run into something you need me to tag just let me know in a comment, Gen, Mild Language, Tags are kept to a minimum to avoid spoilers, Violence frequent but not graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 04:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17842925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charon_the_Sabercat/pseuds/Charon_the_Sabercat
Summary: A chunk of Motorcity went up in flames, and when the fire went down, there was a whole new pocket of Detroit to explore. Mike couldn't pass that up, and if he had anything to say about it, Chuck wouldn't either. It was just a bad idea to explore alone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A great many ideas were contributed by my friend Red and my friend whose pen name is Lust_Demon!

The day had started so normal, if early for a Tuesday morning. Kane had launched an attack against the Motorcity fresh water source, and Mike and the gang had successfully drawn the Kanebots away. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a lot of flying Kanebots falling into smoldering rubble with each successful hit of Mutt's charger cannons. Mike picked them off one by one, shot by shot, until they were down to the last two or three. It was almost a day not worth telling Jacob about, he thought to himself, until a Kanebot blew and a spark fell just past Julie's window.

“Mike, heads-”

That was all Julie managed to get out before the wall next to her went up in a pillar of smoke and white flames, and the day went from normal to terrifying in the space it took Mike to blink. It took two seconds for his brain to catch up with what he just saw, and his heart clenched as he wailed, “JULIE!”

“I’m okay!” 9Lives peeled out of the smoke at full tilt, paint gone on the driver’s side but still driving. 9Lives tires squealed as Julie pulled her out of a fishtail. “I’m okay, it just surprised me!”

It didn’t do much to calm him down. His rearview mirror was quickly filling with black, billowing smoke and little licks of flame that jumped towards the ceiling. Mike shouted into the comms. “Everybody behind me, and floor it! We gotta get out of here before it catches up with us!”

Driving in formation and keeping close to Mutt, The Burners collected a safe distance from the tower of fire and watched it gutter and put itself out almost as fast as it had started up. Mike jumped out of the car and headcounted everyone, checked Julie over to make sure she was all right, doublechecked 9Lives to make sure it wasn’t leaking or melted or punctured. Other than Julie’s ear ringing and the singed paint and tires, everything was fine.

Mike had to repeat that to himself out loud a few times. Maybe if he did it enough, his heart would stop pounding. “Okay! Okay, we’re okay, everybody’s okay? Everybody’s okay.”

Texas pointed over his shoulder to the billowing smoke and licking white fire slowly licking their way back down to the ground. “What about that? That doesn’t look okay.”

“All right, WE are okay!” Mike frantically corrected himself. “We the Burners are okay, and nobody’s dead, and that’s good! Today’s a good day!”

Chuck was already pulling up screens, checking the Motorcity map. “Only you would call a day that included the city catching on fire 'good'! I need to check what went up so we can-” His screens blinked red with alerts. Chuck said with alarm, “I don’t get it! According to my readouts, that should have been a solid hunk of metal scrap and trash! There shouldn’t be anything that combustible over there!”

“Oh gee,” Julie droned in her most bitter snark, “Makes me feel so much better that there shouldn’t have been an explosion. I can almost hear the ringing in my ears magically going away.”

Chuck scowled. “Just like I can feel my relief that you’re _alive_ magically going away.”

“Guys! Woah!” Mike put himself between Chuck and Julie and pulled them both in for a hug, one under each arm. He could feel them struggling in his grip, and he only squeezed them tighter so they'd calm down. “Let's be nice, that’s the adrenaline talking, everybody cool down-”

Texas pointed back to the smoldering pile. “Can we really cool down while Motorcity's on fire?”

“I mean- no?” Arms full of squabbling friends, Mike tried to shrug. “Guys if you have ideas, help me out, but I’m at a loss here! Firefighting is not something I thought we’d ever have to do!”

“I don’t think we need to really hurry,” Chuck pointed out. Untucking himself from Mike’s arm, he zoomed in on his map, showing off the sector in a low-resolution thumbnail. “Uninhabited in a two mile radius, no crops growing there, no recycling programs in place- I mean, literally, it’s just a big pile of compacted garbage. It might as well be a giant rock.”

Dutch let that thought hang with the statement, “A giant rock that exploded.”

“Well not really ‘exploded’,” Chuck corrected. “Just kind of ‘combusted’ and- aagh!”

It hit them all at once: the _smell._ The acrid, bitter, pungent smell that rolled down from the clouds and along the road, the smell like every awful part of burning tires and bleach and sewage and mold, it all came down in a wave that hit their noses and stuck straight to the backs of their throats. Poor Chuck, who had his mouth open at that exact moment, nearly hurled onto the ground. Mike, Dutch, and Julie all pulled their shirts up over their noses. ROTH, safely tucked into Whiptail, screeched with alarms and sympathetic whirs of discomfort.

Texas brayed out a noise of horror. He was the only one who didn't have a shirt to pull over his nose and mouth, and he was left to wail. “It smells like my grandma!”

“Dude,” said Dutch, “What the hell is your grandma doing to smell like that?”

“She’s been dead for seven years!”

Dutch shouted, “GOOD LORD!”

“I’m all for just turning around and letting this dumpster fire put itself out of its misery!” said Julie. “Show of hands, who’s out of here?”

Chuck, muffled, spoke through his shirt. “My hands are staying right on top of my nose thank you very much!”

The last of the smoke was finally starting to dissipate. It carried up and out through the vents that would take it into Deluxe, if the air filters didn’t catch it first. Mike chuckled at the idea of Kane having to suffer through this awful reek, because faced with this mess it was about the only thing that could get him to smile. The ugly lump of metal and wreckage, invisible to him for the years he’d lived in Motorcity, settled into a singed speckled black hill sticking out of the city skyline.

He backtracked. What was speckling? He tilted his head to get a better look, and the little flecks of white and blue shifted along with him. He reached out to touch Chuck’s shoulder. “Hey. Can I borrow your slingshot? Just the zoom function, not the whole thing.”

Chuck winced. “And drop my shirt?”

Mike shot him a look, sympathetic but insistent. “You can handle a bad smell for a few minutes, Chuckles.”

With a resigned whimper, Chuck freed his shirt and popped his cybersling into place. His face wrenched as the smell hit his nose in full force, but he held himself still while Mike’s head settled onto his shoulder and looked down the sight. Chuck zoomed in further to the wreckage, and the rest of the Burners crowded his arms to look for what Mike was sighting out.

“Guys…” Mike pushed Chuck’s wrist, scanning over the whole hill. “It’s hollow.”

The fire had left behind a framework. It wasn’t constructed that way, by any means. It was a tangle of old bicycles, bunkbeds, and piping, and those were just the bits Mike could recognize at a glance. The speckling was light shining through the gaps from the other side, and as Mike dropped the zoom view, he spotted something through the holes. Something in the center, rectangular and dark, on the inside of the structure.

“Chuck…” Mike asked, “Can you find us a road that gets to that thing?”

“You wanna go towards the thing that nearly blew up my car?” Julie snarked.

“It’s a part of Motorcity I’ve never seen before…” Mike grinned. “You bet your butt I do.”

They gave the stench a few more minutes to pass before loading back into the cars and setting off. Chuck's maps lead them down a blackened side road. The trip was nerve-wracking and quiet. The road went so narrow they had to drive down it single file, so winding that they inched along at 10 miles per hour, so steep along the sides that Chuck couldn't even enjoy going that slow. They dove deep into that tiny excuse of an alley, that little sliver of space between the ramp and the exploding hill, and found water.

At least, Mike assumed it was water. It still smelled pretty bad, but in a way he could faintly recognize, like a watered-down paint thinner. The bare ground below his boots lead off into a gradual slope down into the dark moat that surrounded the trash mound. The enormity of the thing really sunk in now that he was standing at the base of it, but his eyes instead followed the line of the water through the hill’s understructure… and below it, into an alcove.

“Check it out, guys,” said Mike. He laid his hand on the metal superstructure- the “moat” was only about an arm's length across- and knelt down to peer into the little recess. “A hidden cave. Anybody got a flashlight?”

“Well, yeah but no?” said Dutch. “I mean it’s in Whiptail, but…” He vaguely motioned over to where Julie, Texas, and ROTH were doing vague geometry, trying to find a way to turn Stronghorn around without bashing into the other cars. “I kinda wanna make sure we can leave here without having to drive backwards up a hill first.”

Mike ducked his head and offered Dutch an apologetic smile. “In my defense, I didn't know space would be so... limited?”

Dutch rolled his eyes just in time to catch Stronghorn's bumper getting dangerously close to Whiptail. He darted away. “WOAH DUDES! Watch the finish!”

Mike just gave a little chuckle. Speaking of, actually, here was Chuck now, tugging on his shoulder with a mild panicked whimper. “Mike, move, your boots!”

He looked down, and with a little gasp of alarm, he jumped up and back from the moat. The toe of his boot had been nudged into the moat water- it couldn't have been for more than a few seconds- and it had already begun to foam and melt the rubber sole. Mike winced. He liked these boots!

“That stuff must be seriously strong acid!” Chuck whispered. “Or something- something really bad! And caustic! If it did that to your shoe-”

Mike completed the thought with a small amount of dread. “Imagine what it could do to our skin.”

“Exactly!” Chuck raised his voice just enough to be heard, and even then, it echoed loud in the high bare walls. “Nobody touch this stuff! It'll melt your skin!”

Texas was quick with a line about “Boiling aciiiid!”, and the Burners quickly fell into a little rhythm of pop culture jokes and light-hearted ribbing. All that excitement for a nasty pool of acid, which wasn't all that uncommon in Motorcity, and a hollow bubble of trash. Chuck and Dutch were bouncing theories back and forth about how it was probably the fumes from the acid lake that started the fire, and it made enough sense to settle his mind. Mike still wanted a peek into that little cave, though, if only to know for sure that it was a dead end and didn't lead into the inside of the bubble. He stole away from the chat to take another look, still wanting a flashlight. If it were just plain water, he could probably just wade through and check. There was more than enough clearance to keep his head above water, and he was sure the pool couldn't be that deep.

From within the little alcove, he heard tapping, and his body locked into place. All senses tuned to that little knocking noise, he stayed still and listened. Carefully, he watched.

A bottle floated out.

“ROTH.” Mike waved the little robot over. “Come get this for me.”

That plastic bottle- more of a jug- bobbed just out of his arm's reach. ROTH flew out to pick it up instead, and through the paint melted off his “fingers” where he held the bottle, he wasn't in any obvious discomfort while he held the bit of litter up to Mike to see.

It was a plastic jug of synthetic motor oil.

Texas immediately gasped and spoke. “I call it!”

“I'm the one that got my paint stripped by the explosion!” Julie snapped back. “I call it!”

“Why isn't this dissolving?” Mike asked Chuck.

Chuck shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “Acids don't melt plastic. ROTH's mostly plastic, and _he's_ not melting.”

Texas shot between them, pointing out into the moat. “Well, then I call that thing!”

“What thing-” Mike's question caught in his throat. That one little bottle was only the beginning: now the moat was full of little bits of plastic junk, all pouring out of the mouth of the little alcove. Grabbing any plastic thing- take-out forks, cups, squeegee brushes, whatever- out of their cars, the Burners quickly collected a little cache of goods packaged in plastic. Wiper blades, power steering fluid, antenna toppers, hoses and gaskets, and one miscellaneous sealed package of women's underwear which Julie claimed, all sat at their feet in a wet little pile while more junk and bits of boxes still floated in the acid moat.

“Man, and I just needed some new window gromits for the cars!” Dutch cheered. “Awesome! Happy birthday to us!”

“Where's this all coming from?” Julie thought aloud.

Mike's eyes fell back on the trash dome, and his face split into a massive grin. He had an idea. “Hey guys. Think we can get one of those canoes from the park at the lake?”

“The ducky paddle boat ones?” asked Texas, “Or the plastic flat kayak-y ones?”

Chuck blanched. “Mikey, you don't mean-”

Mike pulled the Burners into a huddle. “Think about it, guys. This could be untouched scavenging territory. What if there's more automotive stuff like this inside, waiting to be picked up?”

Dutch was starting to catch Mike's drift, as well as his smile. A light sparked in his eyes as he imagined possibilities. “Even the stuff we don't use, we could trade out for other goods!”

“And to some top buyers, too,” Julie whispered with a delighted undercurrent of conspiracy. “It could be one of the only scavenging sites for car parts that the Duke doesn't have his hands in.”

“Why trade it when we can stash it all back in the garage for later?” Texas suggested. “We go through these little weenie car parts like Jacob goes through water! We get enough stuff, and we won't have to pay anything for replacement parts for, like, the next two million years!”

Chuck worried, “Guys, we're counting our chickens here! For all we know this could be everything, and there's nothing but mutant rats and radioactive acid eels in there or something!”

“We've gotta track this back to its source.” Mike punched a hand into his fist. “And those dumb little plastic tourist boats are our ticket to paydirt.”

“This is seven different flavors of a bad idea,” Chuck whimpered. “I can feel it in my gut.”

Dutch rolled his eyes. “That's probably just your breakfast.”

Chuck huffed and crossed his arms. “I'm telling you guys, bell pepper and radish tastes good together! Just not for the first couple bites.”

Mike threw an arm over Chuck's shoulders. “We'll bring safety gear and flashlights, and one car so we're not packed in like sardines when we come back. For quick escapes. Good compromise?”

With a sigh, Chuck deflated into the half-hug. “This isn't so much a 'compromise' as me being outvoted, right?”

“Ex-actly.” Mike patted his back firmly. “Let's regroup at the garage, guys. Today just turned into a treasure hunt.”


	2. Chapter 2

Fetching the boat was probably the easiest part of the trip. The weird guy who ran the park, nobody knew why or how he just did, kind of let them have the boat without doing much more than raising half an eyebrow at them as they passed. Harder was finding a way to strap it to Stronghorn. They eventually accomplished it, roughly, by just having ROTH extend his arms and hold the boat in place as they drove. They had agreed that taking one car, rather than trying to pack the entire fleet into the alcove again, was the better idea. Still, that left Stronghorn the only option that made sense as the only car with two passenger seats instead of just one. Two passenger seats and four Burners later, they all made their way back towards the acid beach amidst loud, nervous discussion.

“I think I packed enough,” Chuck thought aloud from his spot between Dutch and the driver's side window. He just barely managed to fidget with the bag, folded and mashed into what would have been the door by Dutch's broad shoulders and refusal to give up his side of the bucket seat. “Do you guys think I packed enough? I got water, I got dried peas for snacks, I got bandages-”

Dutch could not project his groan enough in the tiny little space he was forced to share with Chuck. “Yes, Chuck, I think you packed enough.”

“Okay that's the first part, the second part is worrying I packed too much. The batteries should be good but I'm not sure-”

“Chuck! Oh my god!” said Dutch. “Stop! You're fine! Mike's going scavenging, he's not leaving Detroit!”

“He's going scouting in unfamiliar territory!” Chuck countered. “What if something bad happens to him?”

“Children!” Texas shouted from the front. “Daddy Texas will turn this car around!”

Mike, meanwhile, just quietly sat in the other seat with Julie on his lap, watching it all go down with a slightly dazed air. Chuck freaking out over trips wasn't a new development, but Mike was waiting for Chuck to remember the very important bit that seemed to be escaping him at the moment. With Dutch and Chuck nearly at each other's necks just during the drive, he wasn't sure he'd be remembering anytime soon. Plus, he had Julie on his lap and his hands around her waist, and that was distracting enough on its own. Let no one ever say Mike Chilton didn't enjoy any opportunity to snuggle.

Julie, unbothered by the whole situation until then, pulled a face. “Can we not do 'Daddy Texas' again? Like ever again?”

Texas shrugged, never taking his eyes off the road. “Well, I suppose _Mommy_ Texas can put the boys over his knee, if you're weirded out that much.”

“Are we there yet?” Dutch asked with an urgency he did not have before hearing “Mommy Texas”. “I am seriously feeling the need to be out of this car.”

Stronghorn pulled onto the ramp that would take them down to the acid beach. Texas happily said, “Almost!”

“Today is gonna suck...” Chuck moaned. “I just know it.”

Julie rubbed at her temple. “I think I would've rather had ROTH's seat.”

Mike playfully poked her rib. “Ow, my pride.”

“Tiny speaks!!!” Texas cheered. “That's the first thing you said since we left! I thought you were asleep.”

“Nah,” Mike assured him. “Just lost in thought.”

“You're made of sterner stuff than me,” said Julie. “If I had a girl on my lap for 20 minutes, I'm pretty sure my brain wouldn't be working anymore.”

Dutch let out a loud, surprised laugh while Chuck, finally, cracked a grin and tried to hide how his shoulders were twitching. Mike snickered and jabbed at her ribs again to make her squirm. Texas pumped his fist. “Julie telling it like it IS!”

It figures that just as the ride was starting to get fun, it ended. The Burners spilled out of Stronghorn like foam out of a dropped can of beer, and Chuck immediately took the boat from Roth and carried it over to the acid beach. He flipped it onto its bottom and placed it down on the ground, then gently shoved it into the moat. It floated, and while the bottom did discolor right away, nothing else happened to the plastic.

Chuck huffed in relief. “Okay, the boat's safe.”

Julie rolled her eyes. “Good to know that it floats. We might have put it in the water and it would have jumped 20 feet into the air.”

“Don't patronize me, Julie!” Chuck growled. “You're making jokes now, but if Mike got into that boat and it sank into the _lake of acid_ , you'd be sorry!”

“Woah!” said Texas, “And we're back to twitchy whiny mode. Chuck's got no chill today.”

Chuck, free to flail, flailed with an energy he usually reserved for 560 miles per hour. “I can't have chill today! This is dangerous! We have a checklist to go over. Mike, you ready?”

Mike's brain stalled. He was already starting to get into the boat when Chuck spoke. “Uh.”

“ _Mikey don't leave yet,_ oh my god!” Lifting Mike up to standing by his shoulders, Chuck listed out the contents of the travel pack. “Look, I've got you some ropes, some eyelet hooks, a flare gun, some bandages, bottled water, those chipotle-flavored dried peas-”

“Oh,” cut in Mike, “I like that kind.”

“Yeah I know!” Chuck grinned, and got back to the list. “Some plastic gloves and baggies for if you find anything and want to bring it back, a flashlight, batteries for the flashlight, and one of those crappy magnet flashlights that you shake a bunch to get them to light, just in case.” He thrust the little backpack into Mike's hands. “Now. Can you think of anything else you want to bring? This is the last chance we have to go back and get it.”

Well, it looked like Chuck forgot. Mike smiled. “Yeah. This.”

He threw his arms around Chuck and fell backwards into the boat. They landed hard, and the impact shook the boat off the ground and properly out into the moat, but they stayed dry. Texas was laughing, over at the car. Mike chuckled. Chuckles screamed.

“MIKEY WHAT THE HELL?!”

“Hey, traveling alone is dangerous!” Mike smirked. “You thought I wasn't bringing my best bro along with me?”

“I- look- You didn-” Chuck squealed. “Nobody said _we_ were going anywhere!”

Over at Stronghorn, Dutch was leading the others in a little sashay and the song “Dumb Ways to Die”. Chuck whimpered.

“Guys, come on!” Mike thumped Chuck's back protectively and sat up in the little boat. It was made to sit shallow in the water, so Chuck's extra weight made no real difference. It didn't leave much room to wiggle around, but they didn't particularly need it for a little trip. “I won't let anything bad happen to him.”

“Just in case!” Dutch shouted after them. “I'm gonna have ROTH shadow y'all from above!”

“It's a good thing, too! Your expedition's already at a serious disadvantage!” Texas flexed hard. “A TEXAS deficiency!”

Julie waved. “Have fun stormin' the castle!”

“This is stupid-” Chuck tucked into himself, making himself a little shivering ball of misery in the middle of the canoe. “Only packed enough for one person...”

For what it was worth, it was a pretty awesome little cave system. Mike immediately hooked the rope into an eyelet hook and started a guideline from the entrance, tracing out a path and doubling back whenever the path lead to a dead end. Light filtered down from above in little patches that reflected off the acid, almost like the bottom of a pool, and the metal frameworks muffled the sounds of city noise from outside. Where they had enough room, Chuck took out the flashlight and looked down into the acid. It stayed crystal clear and still, and it made seeing the very deep lake bottom super easy. Chuck stopped looking down after that first attempt.

They traveled through those caves for something like ten minutes, slowly pulling themselves along by the pipework in the walls. They were blessed by the spaces being nice and wide, and the boat never lacked for room on either side. There was one patch where the ceiling dropped, though, and Mike and Chuck had to lie flat in the bottom of the boat and press close to have enough room to travel through. Mike tucked Chuck into his shoulder and pulled them along by hand.

“You know if you want hugs, you can just come get them, right?” Chuck grumped into his ear. “You don't have to contrive stuff like this and make me go on dangerous expeditions to acid lakes.”

“Dude, there was no way I wasn't bringing you with me. Exploring's no fun without you!” said Mike. “This is just kind of a bonus.”

“At least if you'd told me beforehand, I could have prepared...” Chuck wet his throat. “I could've packed another bag, I'd have more room to carry stuff if we found it, just all kinds of stuff I could've been ready for...”

Mike allowed himself a little sad smile. “You would've prepared yourself into a hole and not come with me.”

“No I... Well I didn't _want_ to come but if I knew that I would have to then-”

Mike could feel him struggling for the words. It was a twitch that ran all the way through Chuck's body, and it was easy to feel at the bottom of the boat. Feeling a little pity for his best friend, he offered Chuck an out. “Hey, acid dissolves metal, right?”

“Well, it depends on the metal, it's more corrosive than dissolving it outright in most cases, but-”

Mike huffed in relief. Chuck had taken in with enthusiasm, and Mike followed it. “So why is this thing still standing?”

“OH jeeze Mike don't ask me questions like that when we have two inches of clearance between the ceiling and an acid bath...” Chuck swallowed again and coughed. “It could be resting on a very structurally unstable network of half-dissolved metal struts, or maybe a loose pile of plastic trash that could shift at any minute, or it could be suspended from the ceiling and something could happen and it could break-”

The ceiling finally rose again, and Mike sat up to stretch. “You have a crazy good imagination dude... and I think I might agree, that was a rough question to ask.”

“Mikey...” Chuck, still low in the boat and looking forward, tugged at his jacket. “Look up there. I see lights.”

“Yeah?”

“ _Neon_.”

“Woah...” Mike hooked the rope onto the nearest pipe and started pulling them towards the new light source. Neon, here? There wasn't any neon in this part of Motorcity, not for miles...

A few more minutes of pulling themselves through the cave, and Mike broke through the outer wall. The metal superstructure rose above them in dome. The acid lake spread out from there to the opposite side, just barely within sight, and at the center of the round acid lake was an island. It was a hilly, trash-covered island with only enough room for a single building.

What a building it was. A rectangular monolith, it towered up from a yellowed white base level into a multi-story complex without windows and only a single front glass door. Featureless at first, Mike took a closer look and saw that each story, moving up to about twenty that he could count from here, was made of a different material. One wood, one concrete, one glass, one made exclusively of plywood, another of compressed plastic; it all made him a little nervous to look at. Only the base was decorated with blinking neon lights, spelling out a single word above the doors: “MOTORPLEX”. The shattered and burned-out remains of other neon tubes stuck scattered along the rest of the walls.

“Oh my god...” Chuck smacked his forehead. “Oh my god I didn't think to bring paddles! There's no way to reach it!!!”

Mike realized that, indeed, they were a good 100 feet or more from the island. “Oh.”

Dutch's voice shouted from the other side of the wall “Reach what?!” before he popped onto the comms. The signal came through fuzzy and overlayed with static. “I can hear Chuck screaming from here! What'd you find?”

“It's an island with a big building on it! Says 'Motorplex' on the front in neon.” Mike gave it a hard appraising look. “It... kind of reminds me of Jacob's place.”

Dutch, confused, asked, “The diner, or the garage?”

“No, the store, but taller. Like it's been built up from the bottom.” Mike tugged on his earlobe. The static was making his teeth itch. “Why are you coming in fuzzy?”

Chuck opened his comm to chime in. “It's probably whatever was keeping us from seeing inside the dome before it caught on fire. Could be anything!”

Dutch asked, “It's not interfering with ROTH, is it?”

“I haven't seen-” Mid-thought, Mike checked the skies. There was ROTH, floating down to help. “Wait, there he is. I don't think so? You okay, ROTH?”

ROTH, worryingly, greeted them with a distressed chirp and a droop once he leveled out. Chuck patted his faceplate and told Dutch, “He's not looking too rosy. We should lay down the rope on the shore so we can pull ourselves back when we're ready, and maybe send ROTH home.”

“I'm thinking that's the better call, yeah,” Mike agreed. “I don't wanna fish ROTH out of the lake.”

ROTH took Chuck's hands and pulled the boat the long way to the shore. Stepping out onto the plastic beach, Chuck sunk an eye hook in deep in the first sturdy plastic thing he could find and immediately triple-tied the boat onto it. Mike got out alongside him and gave ROTH a farewell pat before sending him back to Dutch. He opened up the comm. “ROTH's on his way.”

He got a fuzzed-over response that only vaguely sounded like Dutch's voice.

“This is getting less and less safe by the minute...” Chuck wrung his hands. One of his feet was half-sunk into the refuse collection. “Let's beach-comb, or something, see if we can't find anything good and then head back-”

Mike shook his head. “Nuh-uh. We want something worth coming for, we gotta go in there.”

“Mikey, at least give it a look!” Chuck pleaded. “We can always make a pile and come back later!”

“Unless another gang finds it and loots the place before we find anything.” With a hand on Chuck's shoulder, Mike lead them right up to the glass doors. “No, we're gonna look for some good shit, and then we leave, and come back with nice big bags and do it again.”

Mike threw his shoulder at the door to open it. It slid open automatically as soon as his boots touched the welcome mat. Chuck squeaked and recoiled in shock, only kept from retreating by Mike's hand on his back. Standing in Mike's way was a wall of stained cardboard boxes, stacked up to and past the top of the door. Something inside the building dinged at their arrival.

A lone box shifted back into darkness, and a voice from inside spoke.

“Thank you for shopping at Motorplex. How can I assist you today?”

 


	3. Chapter 3

Chuck recoiled with a yelp and ducked behind Mike. Mike was stunned. He hadn't been expecting people at all. Did they live here? Was this just a normal business? It seemed busy inside, if the muffled din of a crowd behind the boxes told him anything. He couldn't see into the building through the little box hole, so he wasn't even entirely sure it was a person behind that wall or if it was a prerecorded message. It certainly had that prerecorded tone: perfectly delivered and pleasantly lilting with added happiness.

“Oh jeeze,” Chuck whispered. “Oh jeeze people. Little group of isolated people. What if this is a Terra situation? What if we're some kind of first contact? We gotta play this safe-”

“Hi,” said Mike. “I'm Mike Chilton. This is Chuck.”

Chuck cowered. “Mikey _what are you doing_?”

The voice spoke again, and out of the darkness, a single eye leaned into better view. A lone brown eye belonging to a dark-skinned face, it spoke in a woman's voice. “How many in your party?”

Mike held up two fingers. “Uh, two.”

“ _Mikey_!”

More of the boxes shifted, and from the shadowy interior came four people. Two men, two women, one of the women much older than the rest of the group. They flanked Mike and Chuck, sending Chuck into a hyperventilating fit, but Mike couldn't see any reason to worry. They were all unimpressive-looking people: short, no chins, sallow-skinned and almost grayish in the light. Dressed in normal clothes (albeit heavily repaired with a variety of materials), all of them wore blue vests with white acrylic name tags. Mike read their names in short order: Quintessa, Marcus, Michael, and the oldest was Madge. The crowd noises grew louder once the cardboard was moved, and Mike was sure there were more people inside. A lot more.

Mike gave Chuck a hard nudge with his elbow. “Check it out, they have a Mike too.”

Chuck only whimpered.

Marcus might have been the one in charge. He gave the two an appraising look before signaling to Quintessa with his first two fingers. When she talked, Mike recognized her as the one who had been speaking. “Please wait for the next available customer service representative. Calls may be recorded or monitored.”

He gave a little smile. “So we waiting out here or-”

The group swept behind him and Chuck, formed a line, and pushed forward.

“-or we're going in!” Mike put an arm around Chuck and lead them inside. “That too!” He gave Chuck a little pat when his friend squeaked in protest. “Relax, I can handle anything these guys throw at us.”

They stepped into the building. The quartet of vest-wearers shut the boxes behind them.

Mike said he could handle anything the place threw at him, sure.

He didn't count on there being a new, even more awful smell than the acid lake.

He and Chuck gagged as the collective reek of human bodies hit them all at once. Living bodies, to clarify, all the sweat and musk and funk of unwashed pits and clothes in close proximity and stagnant air, layered under perfumes and body washes that had long since passed their expiration date and wandered into the ripe manure odor territory. It hit them hard, and closed in from every side, and Mike nearly couldn't see from the distraction.

When his eyes focused outward again, it was to a vertical maze of catwalks and rope bridges criss-crossing the largest megamall he had ever seen. Every wall was a store, twenty different stores, Lit individually with different-colored lights and connected by a winding maze carved out of boxes. Stacks of stained and crinkled cardboard boxes that stacked about to his shoulders, just at the eyeline of the blue-vesters, cut paths in every direction to and from the ground level stores, and some even formed stairs that were taken down and put back up in different locations right before his eyes. Even the path he and Chuck walked was hurriedly blocked and reopened as they passed by even more people in blue vests. Mike's attention was caught by the blue-vesters. They only made up about a fourth of the population that he could see. There were a scattered few in green vests with pins and lanyards, and they stood a little taller than the plain unclothed folk that made up most of the crowd. Most kept their eyes down. Only a few reached taller than the box walls. The racket made by the mass of people moving, talking, stomping their feet on wood plank rope bridges, of metal clanging against metal and indistinct foods being dropped into deep fat fryers, of water being sloshed across the floor, all hit into Mike's ears at once and left him dazed. He held tighter to the back of Chuck's shirt and reeled.

“I am going to puke,” Chuck told him bluntly.

Mike had to cut the tension or he was going to lose his breakfast too. “Do it. Might improve the smell of the place.”

Tucked into Mike's arm, Chuck pulled at his bangs and raked his fingers down his cheeks, looking as distressed as a little dog in traffic. “I am never giving Texas shit about his laundry ever again. I don't think I'll ever smell anything else, ever again. I think it's seared into my nose. Next time I'm packing you a gas mask”

“Make it two.”

“Mike after two seconds of this, I swear, I'm never coming scavenging with you again.”

Quintessa spoke behind them. “Attention shoppers, please proceed in an orderly fashion through the double doors.”

The blue-vesters opened a set of double-doors for them, leading Mike and Chuck into a storeroom filled with stacked pallets and more blue-vested workers. The workers shot them dirty looks as they passed, which got Mike feeling a bit more than uncomfortable. He let his eyes skim over the merchandise instead. Lots of foods, lots of clothes, some mangled and re-assembled toys-

“Chuck look!” Mike grabbed his shoulder and pointed to a tucked-away stack in the far corner, against a wall. If his eyes hadn't been trained to look, he would have missed it: a steering column and a stack of tires. “Jackpot!”

Chuck finally smiled. “Replacement tires! Looks like 9Lives size.”

The blue vesters lifted their heads.

“Hey, uh...” Mike pointed to the far stack. “Are those for sale?”

Marcus looked to his group. “Price check?”

“Price check,” Madge agreed. “Manager assistance to front desk.”

“Where's the front desk?” asked Mike.

Quintessa and Michael grabbed each of his shoulders and lead him out, with Chuck close behind via Marcus and Madge. Chuck was already making distressed noises and trying to pull out of their grip. Mike's gut coiled and his hands reflexively made fists.

“Hey!” he told the two. “No need to manhandle us! We were going peacefully!”

“Where were they bringing us before?!” Chuck wailed. “I thought we were going to customer service!”

Marcus raised his head over the crowd. “Attention Shoppers: Manager needed for Price Check at Front Desk.”

The entire ground floor stopped moving all at once. Mike just had time to get a chill before the collective shoppers converged on them and pulled the box labyrinth clear in a mass wave. The quartet of vesters suddenly had a road's worth of “clean” floor, which Mike was fairly certain he and Chuck were being paraded down. Sunken eyes peeked out from behind the newly arranged box walls, watching them while they were marched.

“Mikey do something!” Chuck pleaded.

“Just- lemme see where we're going here,” said Mike.

A few minute's walking lead them to, and Mike was only partly certain, maybe what used to be a Pictures with Santa pavilion. Whatever it was, the structure had been built up and up until it reached maybe three stories high. The tower almost looked built around it, or like the structure had punched through the original roof, but Mike couldn't tell. Bridges curved around it. Doors opened away from it. It had its own light sources from flood lights stuck haphazardly into the poured concrete walls. The cobbled building-in-a-building didn't quite make sense to him, although the high fence of cinder blocks and green-vested workers patrolling with flat-faced dogs on leashes spoke volumes. Whatever this place was- and he realized that it was probably Front Desk even though it was in the rough middle of the building- it was important.

The green vesters met the blue vesters at the one opening in the fence. “Business.”

“Code 111, Aisle 3,” said Marcus. “Price Check for consumer, Manager assistance required.”

The green vester nodded. “Please wait for the next available customer service representative. Your call is very important to us.” Then he left for the big pile of whatever through the cinder block fence.

“Hey!” Chuck wriggled in Madge and Marcus's grip. “How come our call was recorded or monitored?!”

Marcus threaded his hand into Chuck's hair and pushed him down, doubling him over, and in the split second it took for Chuck's yelp to reach his ears, Mike felt Michael's hand ghost against the back of his neck. The tight coil of his back snapped fast. He slammed a shoulder into Michael's collarbone and wrenched the opposite arm out of Quintessa's grip. Madge was too old to hit; he shoved himself between her and Chuck and caught Marcus by the elbow, throwing him over his shoulder and into a green-vester with a guard dog. Chuck fell into his step and ducked behind him, and Mike was already reaching reaching for his staff when the vesters suddenly backed off en masse.

A voice boomed. “Thank you for your patience!”

He was about a foot taller than anybody else Mike had seen yet. Heavier than everyone too, a substantial thick man where the others were various flavors of skinny. His skin still had that grayed color as the rest of the population, but his jet black hair and dark eyes made it look like all his colors had been drained out of him and injected into his clothes. They were some of the best looking in the whole complex. He wore a royal green suit and yellow tie under a red vest, with his golden nametag displaying only the word “MANAGER” in engraved letters. Most of the pieces were whole, in original condition with minimal tailoring, and his shoes were a clean polished black with no-slip soles.

The Manager sized up Mike, standing with Chuck tucked into his arm, ready to fight, and must have seen something he liked. He smiled. “Thank you shopping at Motorplex today! My name is Tony, I will be your manager today! Can I start you off with one of our specials?”

Mike already didn't like him. “You can start off keeping your goons' hands off my friend!”

Manager Tony's smile didn't drop, but it did lose a little edge from thought. “I'm sorry, we don't seem to have Goonshands in stock. Would you like me to place a special order?”

“No, I'm telling you to leave Chuck alone!” Mike slammed his hand on Chuck's shoulder and gave him a good shake. “Or I'm dropping the nice act and hitting back!”

Manager Tony just gave a nice little shrug, hands clasped in front of him. “To expedite your call, please select one of the following options. You can say: Make a Payment, Customer Service-”

Mike leaned into Chuck's shoulder. “Help me out here, buddy.”

Chuck barely spoke above a whisper. He was keeping his eyes on the crowd of vesters looming around them, watching them with tired, suspicious eyes. “Maybe they don't understand normal English anymore. We might need to talk back to them in customer service lingo or something.”

“Why do you think?”

“It's the only thing I've heard since we got here. They only reacted to us when you asked how much the car parts cost.”

“Wait right!” Mike spoke up. “SO, we uh- wanted a Price Check on some car parts back at... Customer Service?”

“You have selected Price Check!” Tony clapped his hands together and grinned, and a few of the vesters visibly relaxed. Mike loosened his grip on Chuck and tapped him a few times for reassurance. “Please select your method of payment.”

“Oh! No no, I still wanted to browse,” Mike added. “Does that make sense? Browse? Shop? Price Match Compare or whatever?”

“Yes!”

“Yes! Good, awesome!” He was getting the hang of this! Retail talk wasn't so bad. “So, we good? Got a... shop directory, or anything? You are here?”

“Directory Assistance!” Manager Tony cupped his hands and shouted over his shoulder. “Directory Assistance to Front Desk!”

“All right! We're back on track!” Mike pulled Chuck back into another half-hug. “And I only had to beat 'em up a little bit!”

“And what exactly are you planning on shopping for?” Chuck grumped.

Mike rolled his eyes and smiled. “Whatever we can afford.”

“Afford with what?”

“I dunno, maybe that shitty magnet flashlight is worth something.”

“You,” Chuck grunted, “Are _trying_ to make me mad today. Those are survival supplies!”

“So's the motor oil and tires!” Mike countered. “Besides, if we open up some nice trade today, we can come back later, and with a better idea of the stuff they want to trade for.”

“This is going way too fast-”

“Only for you, Chuck. We'll be fine.” Mike tousled his hair. Chuck bat his hands away and stood off to huff and pout with his arms crossed. Mike laughed. Chuck was just being a baby; he'd get over it once they were out of here with swag.

Directory Assistance came from the back: a short, round young gray woman with blond ratty hair in high pigtails and a green vest. Her plump lips were dry and chapped, and she stared out at Chuck from behind ragged bangs for a few long seconds before noisily licking and smacking her lips together. She didn't wear a nametag. Chuck quickly pulled out of his pout to hide behind Mike, and Mike had to force his grin a little.

At the very least, they'd get the shopping done. He hoped ROTH was okay back with the gang. He wondered how they were doing.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Manager Tony had to be Directory Assistance's dad. Mike wasn't sure that was her name, of course, but it was all he had to go on as she escorted them from Front Desk. He fussed after her, looked a little like her now that he could study them, and tucked a little backpack over her shoulder as he told her to “drain the registers”. It wasn't out of the question that she was maybe a niece or a younger sibling, but if she was this coddled by the guy in charge? She had to be a daughter. If these people had gone full tribal, then she was probably in the line of succession, too. She carried herself like she was even while she held open doors for Mike and Chuck. Most tellingly, Mike noticed, was that even before she got close to the box maze, the normal folk and vesters were making a wide, clear road for her.

“You are now entering a restricted area,” said Directory Assistance. Marcus and Madge fell into step behind them while Quintessa and the other Mike stayed behind. Directory Assistance, compared to Quintessa and Marcus's clear tones, spoke in mumbles and barely above the din of the crowd. He only really picked out her words because they were familiar. “Calls may be recorded or monitored. Please wait while I transfer you to your department.”

They set out on a long hike. The Motorplex had been a mall in the days before Deluxe. Mike could see it in the broken escalators and recessed lights, sunken into the few chucks of ceiling that hadn't been punched out. Mike's idea of the mall was neater and more compartmentalized. The Motorplex's shops were all a messy tangle of small goods and foods constantly traded from shop to shop. The normal folks poured into stores with shoes and came out with towels, then took those towels to another store for baking tins. Mike couldn't make sense of what had value and what didn't, and when he checked over his shoulder for Chuck's input, he only got a shrug. Ms. Directory Assistance sometimes stepped into the lines of normies and directed them to other shops while she checked in with the blue-vesters behind the counters. It usually amounted to her pointing at something they liked and them just giving it to her. Draining the registers must have been how the Manager family collected their cut.

“Hey, why doesn't she have a nametag?” Mike asked Marcus.

Marcus rolled his eyes and growled with a loud, obvious distaste. “Manager in training. Admin privileges.”

He snickered. He could relate to that feeling. Everybody knew that one little spoiled snob that got away with too much. Mike considered telling them about the Duke of Detroit, but... no. Not until he and Chuck made a good first impression. He kept up the small talk. “So no nametag. What's her name?”

Ms. D.A. Came back with a surprise: a polished jeweled necklace with tiny blue stones inside. She held the trinket up to Mike and grinned wide. Her teeth were severely yellowed. It wasn't an uncommon sight to see crooked teeth in Motorcity, as dental perfection was a very Deluxe kind of thing, but most people took enough care of themselves to keep their teeth clean. Mike forced a smile.

“Trade-in offer...”

“Nah, still shopping,” Mike said gently. “Not quite what I'm looking for.”

Little Manager huffed and tucked the necklace away. He didn't have anything to trade in for as it was.

They kept climbing up flights of stairs onto other floors with more and more stores. Most of them were built out of whatever home and garden supplies had been available in the mall, things like decorative bricks and scrap lumber. The floors were near uniformly plywood that buckled tenuously wherever he put his feet. Chuck shivered when he walked, and by the third floor, was starting to look a little seasick. He might not have been if he kept his head up while walking, but Mike could see it. Chuck had been keeping his comm screens tiny, trying to hide them in his palms while he tapped away at them.

“You holding up back there, buddy?”

Chuck closed his screen and looked up to Mike, his cheeks a little paler than when they started. “Not really. Something about this place makes me-” He stopped mid-sentence and gasped, and all the color came back to him at once. “Look! Electronics!”

Mike eyes followed where Chuck pointed. One little store with a near-intact sign that read “Abbag s” stood not too far away. Wires and shiny metal plugs hung from its ceiling, and the tell-tale gray of electronics plastic was distinct across the multicolor neon lights.

Chuck nearly bounced with joy. “I could build us a hot spot and get messages through to Dutch! This is perfect!”

“Trade-in offer!” Little Manager took Chuck's elbow in her tiny hands and pulled hard. Chuck yelped and pulled hard, but her grip stayed. “Sale in electronics, limited time offer for managers only.”

With a little chuckle, Mike took Chuck's other hand and tugged. Little Manager let go with no small amount of disagreement. “Thanks, but we have nothing to trade in. We'll get you some electronics when we get out of here, Chuck.”

“I don't need them when we get out of here,” Chuck hissed low. “I need them to get in touch with Dutch _now_.”

“We don't know the exchange rate here,” Mike whispered back. “Let's save our budget for the important stuff right now.”

Chuck's face went red, and Mike could feel Chuck's muscles tensing through his arm. “Oh, so only the things _you're_ worried about are _important_.”

Mike's smile dropped. “Are you mad at me?”

“I've only watched you get us deeper and deeper into a situation we can't back out of for the last _two hours_ , but no, I'm not mad,” growled Chuck, “I'm-”

Little Manager wrung her hands and loudly smacked her lips together. It made Chuck shudder, and Mike could see the reflexive winces of disgust go over Marcus and Madge's faces. “How may I direct your call?”

Mike shrugged. “Anything in automotive?”

Chuck groaned like he was deflating and pulled himself out of Mike's arm.

“Automotive...” Little Manager was lost as soon as the word left his lips. Marcus and Madge were searching each other's faces for answers with no success. Chuck was rubbing his eyes through his bangs. “Auto-motive... housewares?”

“No, no, automotive, for the cars.”

That got him more blank looks. Chuck nudged his ribs. “Maybe try something else. It might have been so long they forgot what cars are.”

Mike forgot sometimes, that cars weren't really a thing outside of Motorcity. He opened his mouth, ready to chat, but Chuck was turned hard away from him. His urge to talk died fast, and his lips thinned. “Hmm. Help me out, buddy.”

With a tight, clipped shrug, Chuck guessed, “If they don't know the word, it might just be stuff they never use at all... maybe it's on clearance or something.”

It seemed like a good lead. Mike asked Little Manager. “You got a clearance rack?”

Little Manager outright sneered. “ _Clearance._ ”

Mike sure didn't miss that snide tone in her voice. He chided, “Hey, we're not all made of money.”

She smacked her lips again and ran her tongue over her teeth loudly. With a put-upon sigh, she waved them towards- oh joy, thought Mike- more stairs leading up. “Clearance section, fifteenth floor.”

Little Manager and her licky-lips lead them up a hell of a lot of stairs. Her takes from the side stores were getting smaller and smaller the further they climbed, whether from lack of goods to trade or her unwillingness to carry any more weight in her backpack. Mike counted about eight long rickety flights before his legs started to ache, and the licky-lipped manager-in-training was gasping for breath and dropping to the floor by the ninth. Marcus and Madge didn't look much better, but to Chuck's credit, he had barely broken a sweat. These long scavenging hikes were their thing, after all. A little thought weeded into his mind before he could censor it: normally, they were supposed to be fun, too.

Mike took the chance to look around. The vertical add-on floor was a little better lit than downstairs. Big incandescent bulbs shined out of floodlights, all to light anemic little planters were the normies were growing veggies. The walls of boxes were stable and low here. Chuck could relax a little here; Mike saw him relax his shoulders.

“Well, that kind of makes sense...” Chuck leaned against a bench while he made his observations. “The hot commodities stay down on the low floors where they can be easily traded. The areas farther from the central trading hub do agriculture. Maybe this is where the food comes from. This is kind of amazing... little cultural microcosm, all indoors on one little bitty island.”

Mike huffed out one little laugh through his nose and rested his hands in his pockets. “And you thought we were in danger.”

There went Chuck's casual attitude. He snapped right back into a defensive hunch and crossed his arms tight. “We might still _be_. All that's changed is now we have a better idea of what we're dealing with.”

“ _Which means_ ,” Mike countered with a little more venom than was maybe necessary. “That we're equipped to handle anything that happens here. And nothing's _going_ to happen, because everybody here's been nice to us and we're not in any danger.”

“That's because we got in with the ruling class by some freak accident, Mikey!” Even on the edge of panic, and when wasn't Chuck on the edge of panic since they got here, he was keeping his voice surprisingly low. “Haven't you been checking out the locals? Have you noticed how they always walk with their heads down and avoid looking at the ones in vests? And they're constantly flinchy and scared? Something's up in this place that we're not seeing.”

Mike sighed. “Or you're projecting. _You're_ flinchy and keep your head down all the time.”

That got him a snarl, and Chuck shot back, “That's because I know if I bring _any_ of this up, my 'best bro' will put me down in front of everybody and make me look like an idio-”

“ _That's enough._ ” A line had been crossed- not even crossed, stomped on and kicked hard. Mike felt that jab physically, and he crossed the space between Chuck and himself fast and closed it hard. He pressed two fingers hard in the center of Chuck's chest and kept that pressure there. “Look, pull the 'play it safe' card all you want, but all you've been doing this entire time is telling me that _I'm_ the idiot for bringing us here.”

“Because you brought us here too fast,” said Chuck, pushing back into Mike's space. “With no planning, no gear, no back-up-”

“You _are_ my back-up.”

“Oh gee!!” Chuck threw up his hands and started to raise the volume. “Could've fooled me, for all my input you've been _completely ignoring_ -”

“I've been 'ignoring' all the not-so-subtle jabs that you don't wanna be here.” Mike matched him for volume, and while he didn't have height on Chuck, he could still feel him shrinking when he pulled out the Leader Voice. “Every single little comment, Chuckles, about how much you hate going on these missions with me-”

“I wouldn't hate it,” shouted Chuck, “If for once in your life _you_ actually gave a damn about my safety instead of just dragging me along like- like BAGGAGE!”

“Then you,” he snarled, “ _Can wait for me back at the garage_.”

Chuck opened his mouth to get in the final word, but Mike turned fast to Little Manager and Marcus. “Take him back to the front door. He's too much of a chicken to go there himself.”

Little Manager's head perked up from the dirty floor. “Item return?”

“Yes, whatever,” Mike turned away hard. “Just take him.”

With an elated giggle, Little Manager got up to her feet and sent Madge away with Chuck. He didn't look. He could just hear their feet going down the stairs together, silently. Chuck didn't say anything.

“Clearance?” Little Manager wheezed. “Special bulk discount-”

“Whatever.” Mike pulled his coat tight to himself. Everything felt kind of fuzzy and weighted right now. He wasn't in the mood to decode their weird customer service language. “Yeah. Let's go.”

Little Manager wet her lips loudly and pulled a handful of junk out of her back. “Attention Shoppers! Open hiring period!”

Out of nowhere, a swarm of normal people ran for her, pawing and groveling for the fistful of little whatevers. She clapped her hand against her wrist for a gentle patting noise. “Clearance section, express delivery.”

Tossing out the junk, the normal folk grabbed up whatever they could, then tucked their arms under her legs and lifted her up onto their shoulders. Eyes always down, flinching away from Marcus's stern looks, they carried her to the next flight of stairs. One normie's foot slipped against another one's ankle, and both of them swiftly got a no-slip boot to their backs courtesy of Marcus.

Mike's mouth ran dry, and he swallowed hard.

So, by all accounts, Chuck was right about the vesters being the ruling class. They were very, very much the ruling class. So much so that about ten people carried little lickety-lipped manager woman up to the fifteenth floor, up stairs, on bare feet, for some keychains and snack packs of pretzels. Mike's mouth stayed solidly shut as, finally, he really did watch the faces of the people who passed. They all did flinch, and they did keep their eyes low, and now they were even avoiding his gaze like they did Lickety-Lips and Marcus.

By the time they reached the Clearance Section, and Mike laid his eyes on the pillars of tires stacked up to- and supporting- the ceiling, and the piles of parts stacked in airtight plastic clamshells, and the replacement components for speakers that Dutch would love and fuzzy seat covers that Julie would claim and the gleaming novelty rims that Texas could slap onto Stronghorn...

He really didn't care. He would get these back to the garage, sure, but... but he imagined a better ending to this little adventure. He picked up one little piece from the endless pile of junk upstairs. Air freshener. He put it back down. Felt kind of pointless.

“Layaway?” asked Lickety-Lips.

“Yeah.” Mike nodded. “I'll be back for it later. I'll bring... stuff.”

“Express delivery!” she squealed. She was nearly dancing in joy. This was probably a premium sale for her, getting rid of all this garbage. “Thank you for shopping at Motorplex!”

He was ready to go home. He would call Dutch to send the boat back to pick him-

That weight settled into his gut hard. He kept his hands firmly in his pockets and his eyes on the floor in front of him.

It was a long walk down fifteen stories worth of stairs. Lickety-Lips was carried the whole way down. Mike hurt every step.

By the time he walked out the front door, he was glad to feel the acid fumes cut to the back of his throat. It was like turpentine against a layer of grease, cutting through the oily film that coated his mouth the entire time he'd been inside. Even the low light of Motorcity felt too bright now. He winced as he took a breath and still got a noseful of the Motorplex reek. He would have to wash all of his clothes the second he got home. Twice.

When he finally looked up, there was a pile of garbage where the boat was supposed to be.

He threw himself into the pile in a panic, digging to the very bottom of the plastic-packed pile of car accessories. When his hands finally hit the plastic canoe, he puffed out a relieved breath and sat down hard on his heels to let his heart stop racing. That had been way too close for comfort. Having to sit here waiting for...

… why was the boat still here? He emptied it out the rest of the way. He wasn't sure why, it wasn't like Chuck was hiding under the garbage.

“Chuck?” He stood up and made a circuit around the island. The Motorplex had employees only doors on the back side, but they had long since been boarded up. He even checked to see if they could be opened to the inside. No luck. No sign of him. “Chuck? Buddy?”

He made another circuit, just in case, this time looking out into the acid. He would be able to see him, right? If he'd gone in the water- in the acid- his heart jumped into his chest again. No, he hadn't been that harsh, and Chuck wouldn't have done something like that. Not on purpose- He swallowed hard. “Chuck? I-I'm sorry! Chuck?!”

Back at the boat, he combed over the bottom and found something he'd overlooked. Receipt paper. A very long sheet of receipt paper, and even as he read it, the print was disappearing in front of his eyes. Jacob had said that old paper receipts were made to do that, but this seemed ridiculous. These were hand-written letters on this sheet and they were all fading. He skipped to the bottom.

His total, according to the bottom, was paid in full with...

“1 Shopper: item number 'Chuck'.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

Mike's blood ran cold. Everything he'd said to the Managers spun through Mike's mind in frantic donuts. The trade-in offers. “Item return”. Chuck's posture, Mike giving orders- good lord Lickety-Lips had given him a “manager's only” offer to his face and he didn't even think about it! The managers in the vests- they weren't just the ruling class, the 'customers' were their slaves! Lickety-Lips had been trying to buy Chuck from him!

“CHUCK!” He stuffed the receipt into his jacket and ran for the door. He slammed shoulder-first into the glass, and it didn't open. “I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! Let me back in!”

The door slid open just a sliver, and a voice- not Quintessa, Marcus this time- smarmily chimed, “All sales final.”

“Chuck wasn't for sale!” He wedged his fingers into the door and pulled them open enough to get the toe of his boot inside. “He's not my property!”

Marcus's voice dripped with sadistic delight as he explained. Mike felt the weight in his stomach lighting into a raging fire that licked at the bottom of his heart, focusing his anger into a rage point towards that one disgusting man. “Admission to handling stolen property renders all sales void. Property will be repossessed. Thank you for shopping-”

Mike was going to stomp his face into the concrete. With a primal roar, he shoved the doors apart and solidly kicked into the wall of boxes. They broke with a satisfying rumble and pinned Marcus to the floor. Once Mike's eyes adjusted to the dark, he took a special delight in planting his foot down on Marcus's solar plexus. Chuck had to be at Front Desk, it only made sense that she'd bring Chuck back to where she lived-

Marcus coughed and shouted, “Security!”

Mike was ready for anything. He had his staff handy, he had the emergency supplies pack strapped to his back, he had Marcus under his boot heel. He could handle any guy “Security” could throw at him.

His heart nearly stopped when he saw the box walls moving to make way for a pack of attack dogs.

He really panicked when the shoppers on either side of him started closing the gap to grab at him.

He had to move, not think, just move. He vaulted to the top of a box wall and started running, towards the attack dogs only because it was the direct path in front of him. The boxes weren't stable at all, and every step nearly sent him flying because the cardboard crumpled under his heel, or the shoppers underneath were moving the wall to trip him up. He jumped a gap onto another wall, which gave out under him completely and sent him falling backwards onto a clump of shoppers. He struggled out of the hard landing, his feet finding more people than floor, and only just made it back onto the higher ground when he felt fangs clipping around the sole of his boot. He kept running, and this time he wasn't sure of a direction, he just went.

Shoppers on either side of the wall surged up like a tide of hands, trying to catch him, all on their manager's orders. He could hear them shouting indistinctly over the din. He called out to the crowd, “You don't have to listen to them! I'm on your side! Don't you want out of-”

A hand caught his ankle, and its owner shouted, “Trade-in offer!”

With a pang of immediate remorse, Mike deployed his staff and planted the end straight into the shopper's face. They let him go immediately, and he leaped for a wall. His staff dug into the concrete with a satisfying 'shunk', and he pulled himself off of the box wall and up into the ledge of a neon sign. Pulling the staff back out of the wall was a trickier maneuver, but at least here, he had room to breathe. He was out of the reach of the dogs and the shoppers, and if he got his footing, he could make the jump from here onto a rope bridge.

He scanned the crowd. One of the managers was pulling out a shotgun. An actual, metal, pellet-shooting shotgun. Mike only knew about them because Jacob told stories about using them on little clay frisbees for fun, and how one of them exploded and nearly took off his father's arm.

The neon sign cracked and dropped, and Mike thought “Screw planning” and jumped for the rope bridge. It immediately snapped under the sudden weight, pitching sideways and dumping every shopper on the bridge into the crowd below. Only reflexes and crazy high luck kept him from falling; his hands locked around a wood plank and left him dangling, and the adrenaline in his system made him haul himself up and onto the remaining rope of the bridge. On his hands and feet, he could dart along the rope like a slack line. It only barely worked, and he couldn't tell how he was managing it even while he was doing it. He could only keep running with the dogs baying below him and the knowledge that somewhere behind him, someone had a gun leveled at him and he couldn't see whether he was pulling the trigger or not. Just as his feet hands connected with the floor on the other side of the bridge, the rope snapped, and a chunk of the ceiling that had been roughly in line with his head burst into splinters above him. Little orange pips dropped onto the floor below the explosion of plywood. Rubber bullets. Well, he thought distantly, at least they weren't trying to outright kill him, maybe just... catch him and keep him here forever.

He pulled himself up and ran, just in time for more dogs to round the corner running towards him, and he was up and onto the box walls in an instant, gunning for the stairs.

It never let up. Somehow security on every floor knew to be after him, and he couldn't stop to get his head together. He just had to move and run, up those same stairs he and Chuck had been casually hiking before, except now they threatened to shatter with every panicked step, and behind him they rumbled with the scratch of claws and a stampede of non-slip shoes. One flight, another, three, four-

By the eighth, his legs were starting to ache, and with that thought he steeled his shoulders and sprinted. He heard the guards gasping and wheezing behind him, and by the next few flights, he was starting to lose the dogs. He wouldn't be able to lose them, though. They would pick up his smell and keep looking for him while he was catching his breath. The thought, the mental image of an attack dog digging its teeth into his leg, terrified him enough to keep him running even with his muscles screaming at him to just stop-

At the fifteenth floor, Clearance Section, automotive parts, he whipped his staff on fully and sliced down the wooden stairs. They fell from the opening in the floor in tiny, smoldering pieces and folded into themselves like a house of cards. He could hear the managers shouting something to the shoppers downstairs, but while they did, he got an idea. He turned off the fire on his staff blades and sliced open boxes of supplies. The foul-smelling mix of oil, steering fluid, soap, and any other car-related liquid stashed inside spilled onto the floor behind him. His trail covered, he dashed up to the next floor.

He hid in a corner, behind a pair of refrigerators, and waited.

It was a tense hour. It felt like years. A constant shuffle from below, and finally, feet sloshing against a wet floor. A manager in charge sounded off in disgust one item after another. “Damaged good... damaged good... damaged good... send to Customer Service for disposal. Damaged good...” He couldn't hear any dogs. Flashlights combed over the floor, peeking through the cracks in his hiding place, but none landed on him.

Eventually, they left to look for him upstairs. Passed right over him... not payed well enough to look, he thought with a little humor.

He didn't dare check his clock until he stopped hearing any noise at all. The managers had passed back downstairs. His plan must have worked. The dogs couldn't smell him under all the chemicals, and the managers looked right over him.

He checked the time. It had been seven hours since they left that morning. He was starving... good thing Chuck had packed him some...

Mike's heart hurt. Curled into his dark little hiding spot, his appetite dropped out of his stomach, replaced by thick, heavy guilt. He could handle anything, he said. He could keep him safe. Mike raked through his hair to rub at the back of his head. It barely helped... what was he supposed to do now? He couldn't fight his way through an entire tribe of innocent people and a pack of trained dogs... He couldn't call for backup, and he hadn't established a rendevous time with the gang or anything. Sometimes he and Chuck were just gone for this long, and usually they wrapped up, picked up a pizza or two, found a good high spot and enjoyed the view. Nothing like this.

He wondered. He couldn't get calls out. Maybe within the building? He pulled his comm open and whispered. “Chuck? Can you hear me?”

There was a long second of fuzz... and then a pixellated image of blue, the blue of Chuck's shirt, but no sound. Well, no, there was sound. If Mike strained his ears, he could hear some faint shuffling around, but couldn't see anything else. He tried again. “Chuck?”

The image violently jerked, flashing concrete gray before shifting back to the blue, and then he could hear it. It was definitely Chuck's voice, but extremely muffled, like he'd been gagged. He still reached an impressively loud pitch behind his gag, and something Mike couldn't see thumped against- something solid. It was all so frustrating!

He heard the smack of lips, and Mike and Chuck both went stock still.

“It's time for your performance review...” Lickety-Lips giggled and pulled up a chair- the scrape of chair against concrete was pretty distinct- and sat down on it with a heavy “Oof. Chuck. New hires, very promising... Training will begin at opening, so look your best! Dress code requires short, soft hair-”

Mike wasn't sure what Chuck did, but judging by Lickety-Lip's sudden, solid exhale and the ugly “HWUFF” noise she'd made, it hurt, and he was instantly proud of Chuck for doing it. He was especially proud when Lickety-Lips started wailing “DADDY! This merchandise is defective!”

“The Manager's office is now closed!” Manager Tony was just barely audible from Mike's viewpoint. “Please try again. Our office hours are 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.”

Lickety hissed in a long breath. “Chuck, I'm going to need you to stay late tonight.”

Again, he waited in the dark for silence. Only the comm screen kept him lit, and his breath caught until, finally, he heard nothing. The color of Chuck's shirt changed from normal to a dark blue: the lights had been turned off.

“Chuck?”

Chuck whimpered.

“I'm so sorry,” was the first thing that spilled out of his mouth, without even meaning to, and he cradled the comm screen in his hands. “You were right, you were right about everything- I'm coming for you, and we're getting out of here and never coming back.”

The camera moved haltingly, and with a little wiggle, the pixels changed. Now Mike could see bars, and a few shoddy-made cages across from where Chuck was being kept, housing more normi- slaves, Mike reminded himself. They all had blond hair. Lickety-Lips must have had a thing for blonds, and oh that made him feel gross thinking about it.

“Maybe they're going to sleep...” Mike thought out loud. “I'll be on my way. If she tries anything funny... I don't know! Kick her in the nads or something for me.”

Chuck, through his gag, laughed, and Mike felt the weight in his gut lift

 


	6. Chapter 6

He set out at midnight.

He had taken a nap to clear his head, recharge a little, and rest his legs. Forty-five minutes to the second he slept, and once his timer flashed on his comm screen, Mike was moving. He popped batteries into his good flashlight. He opened the dried peas and slipped them into his pocket, leaving the bag. He wrapped his last bit of rope over his shoulder, and once his eyes had fully adjusted to the dark, he left his safe spot. Midnight on the dot, long enough for the managers to fall asleep after “closing time” by his estimation, should let him move through the Motorplex with a degree of privacy. At least that's what he hoped.

The managers must have made a stack of boxes to get up to his floor after he toppled the stairs. There was a flat panel of boxes below the hole now. It had to be some kind of trap. The boxes were probably full of glass, or dog toys, anything that would make noise if Mike put his full weight on them. He tied off his last bit of rope to a support beam and lowered himself down. Before setting himself on the ground, he simply toed the boxes aside and put his feet flat on the floor with no trouble. They weren't even heavy. He made fast work of pushing them aside and making it out of the trap before, just out of curiosity, he took a peek inside one with an open flap. It was full of squeaky rubber chickens. He knew it.

Night in the Motorplex was eerie. No neon, no shuffling, no crowd noises buzzed his ears. Without windows, the place was oppressively dark. Mike popped the flashlight on, first shining it into his palm to hide the light and then keeping it pointed directly in front of him. No point in shining it out into someone's eyes. The reflective sheen of slime on the floor lit little pockets of sleeping shoppers in a faint glow. They were all tucked into stores, sleeping on the bare floor in puppy piles with the managers slept above them in improvised beds. Hammocks, wash basins, kayaks, freezers with the doors pulled off, anything big enough to hold a person became a bed. All the managers slept off the floor for good reason: everywhere Mike directly shined the flashlight, cockroaches scurried away. The sight made him sick. More than once, the roaches scurried up and over sleeping shoppers, making them shift together in one big mass. Mike couldn't let himself linger. If he wasn't careful, he'd wake someone up that way.

He didn't trust the rope bridges. Wherever he could, he shimmied down walls and set his feet on solid structure rather than chance a rope snapping or waking someone with creaking stairs. It meant a lot of shimmying down wall recesses and climbing across canopies instead, where he could look down and see the worn paths in the floor where the shoppers walked most often. It was a long agonizing creep down to the third floor, but there he could at least rest his legs and plan his next move. It didn't take him long to decide going in from the top of the sloppy structure was easier than trying to go around the dogs and fencing at the bottom. It was only a quick dash and a jump to the Front Desk's rooftop. He wondered if anyone ever tried this before, for how easy it was. He quickly guessed that no, they didn't, because his footing almost immediately gave out against the slimy algae-coated concrete. He slide silently down, fast and uncontrolled, until his heel hit the slightest bump in the slope. Throwing all of his weight on it stopped him, at the cost of pain shooting up his ankle and into his hip, but he was still. He huffed in relief and checked what he had landed on: a windowsill. He crouched low and hooked his toe into the bottom of the window to test for give. It opened to the outside. With a hard twist of his knee, he hooked his foot into the window until his heel was firmly pressed against the interior wall. With that, he slid inside.

Luck would put him in Lickety-Lips's room, wouldn't it? He just knew it was her room, because everything was pink. Every single thing, the walls and the nightlight and the plushie toys and the dolls, all pink, and the glittery jeweled necklaces and rings, all pink, and the carpet that had long since been pressed into a linoleum-like flatness, pink. Not a clean pink, but a grimy abused pink, like it had seen a lifetime of cigarette smoke, like it had been flooded and never quite dried, like she was part snail and had dragged oozy fingers over all of these things over and over again. The woman herself was asleep in one of the few actual beds- the only actual bed- he had seen since he arrived. Mike dragged his feet and parted a layer of doll heads and tiny plastic bricks that clicked and clattered against each other. He hated it, and Mike was seriously considering if he could drop his elbow against her temple just for the fun of it.

Chuck first, he decided. Chuck could do the elbow drop. It was good motivation.

The house made him seasick. Like the Motorplex, it was obvious the place started small and slowly been built up by people who had no clue how to build. The floor pitched to the side at random spots, the walls were uneven and sagging under their own weight, and next to nothing was lit. Mike kept the flashlight forward instead of on the ground and accidentally found several doors that either didn't open or lead to foul-smelling bathrooms that he didn't dare look into. He just kept moving farther down, keeping an eye out for-

He nearly slapped himself and just turned on him comm. “Chuck, make some noise for me. This place is like a maze.”

Like music to his ears; he could hear Chuck's gagged yelling and stamping feet nearby. It only took a few more seconds of searching to find him.

He was being kept in a basement, one of the few rooms in the house with lighting. Mike flipped the switch on as he entered. Surprisingly, the place smelled almost clean, if only the antiseptic chlorine clean of a public pool, like any other place that was constantly wet. The center of the room held a weird assortment of furniture, with two desks, a dentist's chair, a floor lamp, and an air compressor making a small workstation. Cages framed every wall, each one only big enough to hold a single, crouching person inside. Each one of them was blond, and now, each one of them was awake. They looked at Mike with tired eyes, not recognizing him, and he gave them a quick shush before rushing to Chuck's side.

There he was, in the corner right by the door. Chuck slammed into the cage wall shoulder first just as Mike dove to his knees. The tight grid of the cage was too small to even get his fingers through, but he still had to try, and he touched just the barest fingertips to Chuck's hair and cheeks.

“Easy buddy, easy easy easy-”

He was telling himself as much as he was telling Chuck. He had to take stock of the situation, one thing at a time. Chuck had been gagged with duct tape, and his hands bound behind his back.

“Gotta get the key to the cage-” Chuck shook his head while Mike thought aloud. “Or pick the lock, gotta pick the lock and-” Chuck turned his back to Mike. His wrists were tied with plastic zip-ties which pressed visibly tight against his skin. “Gotta get a knife.”   
Chuck whimpered.

“Or scissors! If that would help, right, no knives next to your wrists.” Chuck turned to face him again, one eye peeking out through his bangs. “You tried what I taught you? Getting your hands out from behind your back?”

Chuck nodded with a mournful sound and flexed his fingers. Mike guessed Chuck was telling him it didn't work, for whatever reason. More than likely Chuck had only pulled the zip ties tighter.

Focus, Mike told himself, Chuck could tell him details when the tape was off his mouth. “Be right back, buddy.”

Mike dove over to the desk and started pulling open drawers. He opened three automatically before he realized there were knives in the first one he opened. There were also knives in the second one, and the third, and when he opened the fourth, there were even more knives.

“Okay, I'm still looking for scissors right now, but I found a lot of knives.” He carefully placed the knives on the desktop in a frantic attempt to find scissors. Underneath the knives was a layer of more knives, these being smaller precision knives to the long kitchen knives he'd grabbed before. Something pointy glanced his fingertip, and following the shape of it, he pulled out a long, thick sewing needle. “Hey! I can use this to pick the lock.”

His eyes fell on the dentist chair, and the knives, the endless knives and the needle, and something dark crossed his mind. It settled low into his belly and slowly leeched the warmth out of his blood. The clean smell, the overhead light... when he looked down at his feet, he saw the drain in the tile floor and the dark, sticky stains around the grate. The thick silence hung over his shoulders. His throat ran dry. Mike passed his gaze over the slave cages.

Every single one of them, from bent and elderly women to young teen boys, was watching him. Staring out at him with sunken, tired eyes, their callused hands pointing at the last drawer he hadn't pulled open. All of them blond. All of them thin and weak. All of them with their lips sewn shut.

Chuck whimpered behind his gag somewhere behind him, and Mike only just heard it through the fog around the edges of his vision. His hands hit the desk hard and heavy to keep himself upright. He didn't have food to keep down, but he was going to, whether his stomach liked it or not. Focus. Focus on getting out. Focus on Chuck. Focus on the beat of his heart and the sharp whistle of his breath until he could think straight again and the blood was back in his veins.

Chuck rattled his cage walls, and Mike snapped back into his body with a start. Reality came back in stinking, slimy high definition. He shook his head hard to get the feeling back in his brain. Opening the last drawer found the kind of thick, heavy scissors that could cut through the tendons and small bones of butchered meat, and Mike noted that it sat strangely in his hand. The answer came when all the slaves frantically gestured to get his attention and pointed to their left hands. He swapped them into his other hand and they fit perfectly. Why did it have to be left-handed scissors? He didn't even remember the little manager being left-handed. Did she use the scissors in her off hand to-

He killed that thought in its tracks. Long needle in hand, he settled in front of Chuck's cage and started at the lock. Picking locks was so stupid, he hated it, why couldn't it be a rope instead? He could untie a knot easy, or he could just slice it open with one of the six million knives. Mike growled and turned backwards, fiddling with the needle behind his back.

Chuck groused at him behind the gag.

The other slaves were all watching him, and it was making him a little self-conscious. Mike snapped back, “So I can do it better this way! Big deal!”

Chuck was thoroughly offended by the fact.

“Well it's just how I learned to do it! I don't see you complaining!”

Of course Mike couldn't see him complaining, he could hear so clearly even with Chuck's mouth completely covered, Mike's back was turned.

“Are you seriously sassing me while I'm breaking you out of a cage?”

The lock popped, and the door opened into Mike's palm.

He was snapped around in an instant, throwing the needle and scissors to the floor so he could pull Chuck into the tightest hug he could give. Chuck leaned into him so hard, Mike swore Chuck was trying to climb him. He threaded his hands into Chuck's hair to pull his bangs aside and check his face. His eyes were red from crying, as was his upper lip from wiping his nose on his shoulder.

Mike's fingers hovered at the corner of the duct tape. His gut clenched. “Sorry for this, Chuckles.”

Chuck braced himself.

Mike grabbed the tape and pulled. It came away wet and sticky.

Chuck gasped, “Pocket knife! That's what I forgot to pack-”

“You're okay!” Nothing had happened to him! Mike hugged him again out of sheer relief. Chuck's mouth was completely stitch-free, probably untouched for as long as he'd been gagged! “JEEZE when I saw the knives and then the needle and the chair-”

“I know! I know, that's what she's planning on doing!” Chuck whispered frantically. “Every time she tried getting me out of the cage, I kept kicking her!”

“Good!” Mike gave Chuck one last hard squeeze and pulled away to collect the scissors. “Let's get you free and make a break for the front door. Once we're in the boat-”

“Mike, that's not gonna work!” Chuck whispered.

“What?” Mike wrestled the scissors into the little gap between the zip ties and Chuck's skin and slowly squeezed down. “Why not?”

“Because I tried! When they first brought me down here, I made a break for the door, and- AH!” Chuck yelped once the scissors finally cut through the plastic and glanced his skin. Mike kept the other wrist while Chuck flexed his freed hand. “And it's locked! It's always locked unless a manager goes and unlocks it! That's how they keep everybody inside.”

Mike wrestled with the stupid left-handed scissors and their stupid dull edges that only just cut through the zip ties. The rotten little strip of plastic fell to the floor. “That's what I have a staff for!”

“And that's what they have the attack dogs for, Mikey!” Chuck hissed. “Would you _please_ just listen to me for once?!”

Mike froze.

Chuck continued, finally facing him. “Look, I know you don't like taking the way out that doesn't involve fast cars and fighting and blowing shit up, but between you and me and every single person in the Motorplex going for our throats, we're better off sneaking out through the roof where nobody's expecting us. We can either go down the side of the building to get to the boat, or if the reception's good, we can call Dutch and he can send ROTH to airlift us, and if we leave that way, at least we can leave here with some of the stuff. Sound good?”

Mike struggled for the words. Every little thought waged war in his head, trying to come up with the right response to _that,_ for so long that Chuck started to look at him funny.

Mike croaked, “You _honestly_ think I still care about the _stuff_?”

Chuck, staggered, rubbed at the back of his head. “Well, I mean-”

“I haven't cared about that since-” and he stopped himself, because the thought that he sent Chuck away like some misbehaving pet still physically hurt him to even think about. Out of frustration, he just pulled Chuck into another tight hug. “Do you know how scared I was that- I couldn't- I was stupid, okay! I'm sorry! This is all my fault and I didn't listen to you and-”

Chuck's arms wrapped around him and patted his hair, and Mike's voice cracked. He muffled it in Chuck's shoulder. “-and I'm a little freaked out still, okay? I don't... have words big enough to apologize. I'm just sorry. I don't want anything out of that stupid clearance section. I just want you back.”

“Mikey, I didn't go anywhere, I...” Chuck paused in thought. His hands threaded into Mike's hair and held him closer so he could soothingly ruffle his bangs. “Oh... oh you mean, like... as a friend.”

Mike nodded into Chuck's shoulder.

“Oh Mike... you're breaking my heart here, bro.” Chuck nuzzled their foreheads together, and if Mike caught the light he could just see Chuck's eyes through his wall of hair. They were sincere and soft, and Mike lowered his gaze to Chuck's shirt. He wasn't ready for that kind of... feeling, yet. He didn't feel like he'd earned it. “I never even thought about it like that. I wasn't mad, I was just hurt.”

“I would've been mad,” Mike admitted. “I was being a total ass.”

“Yeah, well, I had a _long_ time to sit and think about it.”

Mike's heart sunk.

Chuck's hands were suddenly all over his face, catching up his cheeks while Chuck chanted, “Oh no, _oh_ no, I did it again. I'm sorry! I'm sorry.”

Face trapped in one of Chuck's hands, Mike stayed still while his friend nervously shuffled the hair out of his face and tucked it behind his ears. With everything out in the open, Chuck went back to holding Mike's face. “Look, I really did think about what I said. I had no reason to be that mean, or snide, or just- I spent all that time just trying to make you feel bad about doing anything instead of really stopping you when I felt overwhelmed. Don't take this all on yourself, okay? This isn't your fault.”

Mike wriggled just enough to where Chuck released his cheeks, so he could talk without his lips being smushed. “I'm kind of the reason you're here, Chuck.”

“This isn't _entirely_ your fault.” Chuck gave him a little smile that dropped as fast as it appeared. “I mean it, though. I had no excuse to be as cruel to you as I was. Please forgive me? Even... I'm sorry about what I said when you were getting me out of the zip ties.”

Mike gave him a little nod. “I'm sorry I was shooting down your ideas for getting out of here. We're leaving this place the way we came in.”

Chuck visibly pondered over that. “Escorted by Marcus?”

Mike took Chuck's hands in his and squeezed them. “ _Together_ , you doofus.”

“ _You sap_! Oh my gosh-”

Chuck finally sincerely smiled and laughed and pulled him into one last hug that finally felt right. Not desperate or panicked or sad, just him and Chuck, finally back together without that weird tension between them. Those words felt weirdly overdue, and he capped off the hug with a little smooch to Chuck's cheek for good measure.

“Mike, come on...” Chuck covered his bright red blush with his bangs. “In front of everybody.”

Mike's own blush reached his ears once he remembered, right, they were surrounded by people. He reached down to the floor and picked the scissors and needle right back up. “Chuck, you pick the locks while I cut some stitches?”

The slaves all startled, looking between each other, while Chuck huffed. “You? With left-handed scissors? Give them to me, I'm more ambidextrous than you, and you can pick the lock behind your back because it's _so much harder_ to do it forwards.”

“It is!” argued Mike. “You've gotta do it by feel! Being able to see it makes it harder!”

Still, doing it backwards also gave him an amazing view of the slaves's faces lighting up as they realized that Mike and Chuck were about to set them all free.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Mike could pick locks much faster than Chuck dared to cut stitches. He thought, maybe too late, that he should have slowed down maybe just a little bit. It may have saved him the horrible pluck in his gut every time the scissors snipped through the slaves' sutures. He swore he could see the bounce of tension cross their skin with every soft meeting of the scissor blades. He didn't know how Chuck could stomach it. Mike definitely needed to step away when the slaves started pulling the sutures out of the holes left in their lips, and a sharp bile taste stuck strong to the back of his throat even after eating a few peas from his pocket. He was not feeling great. The lack of food and the smells compounded the stress. His mind kept copy-pasting those holes onto Chuck's face and telling him that's what would have happened if he had been just a little too late. He was ready to get them both out of here... even if it meant yet another trip up those stupid stairs.

Behind him, the scissor noises stopped. There was a little shuffle of denim as Chuck stood to his feet. “There. That's the last one,” he said.

“Then let's get moving.” Time to put that stress in the bottom of his gut, turn it into fuel, get moving again. Mike turned back to Chuck. The slaves all gathered around them from every side. Mike spoke loud enough for them all to hear, but only barely, his voice made rough with the effort. “We'll let them out at ground level, while we go out the way I came in.”

Chuck wrung his hands and ventured a guess. “Don't trust the front door?”

Mike nodded. “I don't want to chance tripping an alarm I can't see. I don't think I can get everybody up the rope, either.”

“Where's the rope?”

Mike hissed. “It's on the roof. I climbed in through the little manager's window.”

“Her _window_?” Chuck whimpered. “You got in here through her _room_? How are we both gonna manage that?”

Three of the slaves pulled on Mike's elbow hard enough to knock him off balance. While his head was down, the youngest of the three whispered into his ear. Even at his age, his voice was dry and anemic from neglect. “Uniform! _Uniform_!”

“Uniform?” Mike waved Chuck close to listen in. “What, you mean the vests?”

“Why would we want a-” Chuck gasped. “A manager vest! That's brilliant!”

“Regulation uniform.” The little guy continued. “No disciplinary action required.”

“Hey, yeah...” Mike realized. “Blend in with you guys, sneak by the guards-”

The little guy nodded. “Same smell.”

“Smell the sam-” and there was the bile again. “ _Oh god_.”

“Hey, remember when I said today was going to suck?” said Chuck. “I'm doubling down on that to include tomorrow.”

Mike and Chuck found themselves pulled to the front door and donning a pair of greasy plastic vests. They ducked down into a crowd of slaves. Nose to shoulder, he and Chuck shuffled through a yard full of sleeping guards and their equally tired dogs. Not a single one of them so much as shifted in their sleep. It was a perfect clean getaway.

Maybe 'clean' was the wrong word. He couldn't help thinking it. Mike took every step through a chest-high ocean of pure hate. These stinking, ugly vests, and who they belonged to, weighed him down almost physically out of pure contempt. As soon as they reached the stairs, Mike peeled off the vest and nearly wrenched Chuck's shoulder pulling his off of him.

“Stay in uniform!” one of the slaves urged.

“I am not associating myself with this any more than I have to.” Mike crumpled the vests like the trash they were. It left a film on his hands. A soft click came from within, and he pulled apart the vests to find two name tags. One belonged to Manager Tony, from that morning when things had gone wrong. The other, tucked into a pocket, must have been hers.

The woman who stole Chuck and put him in a cage, gagged and bound and planning to sew his mouth shut, was named Maggie.

The stress he shoved into his gut sparked, and combusted, welling up into flames that surged into his ears and turned his vision red. Mike ripped the vests apart three times and smashed the name tags under his boot heel until Chuck threw his arms around him in a frenzy.

“Mikey what are you doing?! Calm down!” It was the loudest Chuck could whisper, and his voice was ragged trying to mute himself. “You'll wake up the whole floor!”

Mike turned to address the... He couldn't just keep calling them 'slaves'. The word curdled his blood to even think. A different word stuck out in his head, though, one that he'd heard and read since they had gotten here. He always chalked it up to being lingo, but maybe there was something to it. He tried it out loud.

“Attention Shoppers.”

They had been staring, aghast, at the shreds of the manager's authority lying on the dirty floor before Mike spoke. Every one of them turned their head to him. He had hit on it. That had to be the word, their actual name for themselves. The Shoppers.

“We're coming back for all of you.” Mike slipped himself out of Chuck's grip. “We're getting the cars and we're taking this place down, as soon as we can. Take care of yourselves until Chuck and I come back with reinforcements.”

Maybe he'd gone too far into English, because the Shoppers murmured and gasped to themselves in little whispers rather than respond.

“You really mean that?” asked Chuck.

Mike chanced a little grin. “I'm not letting this dirty little Deluxe keep abusing these people. I think all we'll need is some of the big guns, Mutt, Texas, and a nice big plastic boat.”

Chuck grinned right back. “Add in flamethrowers and a vat of disinfectant and you've got a deal.”

“First stop, electronics department.” Mike wrapped an arm around Chuck and lead him up the stairs with him.

After one flight, he really missed Mutt.

Electronics was a long journey away, made on the ground with Mike leading, looking for the spots in the floor the least likely to creak. Chuck followed in his footsteps, closer and closer as the morning rolled on. Chuck was practically on his back by the time they reached Electronics, but from there, it was a manic split up and silent mad dash to grab every little fiddly bit Chuck needed to make his transmitter. How this particular store wasn't wired with a security system, Mike couldn't imagine. He just counted themselves very lucky as they got away with the parts they needed and nothing more.

The rest of the trip upstairs was made with purpose, a steady rhythm keeping their pace all the way up to the fifteenth floor. Mike hoisted Chuck up into the hole in the ceiling. Chuck caught his hands as he jumped and pulled him up the rest of the way. It was easy. Effortless, almost, other than the pain in his muscles from... everything. Chuck was even smiling as they worked their way up the stairs in the dark, lit by the magnet-powered flashlight. The last floor, the 20th floor, the doorway to freedom, was almost fun to look over now. The little abandoned bits of junk, the torn clothing and dog-chewed toys, painted a much more domestic picture of Motorplex life than anything downstairs. The quiet was almost healing.

There, at the very top floor at the very top of an uneven set of stairs, was a door labeled “Roof Access”. Mike popped the lock open with the long needle before it finally gave up the ghost and snapped in half. The door opened to the center of the roof. Chuck nearly giggled with joy as he leaped through the door. “Finally! We can talk out lo- _aaugh this is the worst smell in the world I forgot-!_ ”

Mike staggered hard enough to lose his grip on the door handle. It hung half-open behind him. “Yep... still smells like a lake of acid.”

Chuck upended the bag of goodies and started ripping the components apart immediately. “And here I thought it would smell better up here, away from the fumes.”

“Nope. Worse.” Mike coughed. “Really worse. It didn't smell this bad when I went down to the boat.”

“Why were you down at the boat?” Chuck asked while he wound wires around a metal core.

“I was gonna wait for you!” said Mike. “I thought you'd gone back to the garage, which is dumb, I know, I was still upset-”

“Mike don't make me come over there and hug it out with you again!” There was no anger in this jab. In fact, Chuck was smiling big enough to show his teeth. “Because I will come over there!”

Mike couldn't resist. “You know if you want hugs, you can just come get them, right? You don't have to contrive situations like that.”

Chuck laughed and started hacking hard enough to whimper in pain. Mike dipped back inside for the cleanest-looking scrap of shirt he could find, ripped it in half, and tied the halves around his and Chuck's faces. They looked like the weirdest pair of banditos- the cloth was ducky print- but at least they could breathe a little easier. The acid fumes still stung at their eyes, but it was manageable for now.

Chuck worked, and Mike watched, and time seemed to crawl.

Finally, at something like four in the morning, Chuck's transmitter produced a solid blue comm screen.

“I'm getting a signal!” Chuck's voice nearly cracked from the strength of his joy. “C'mere! Hurry!”

Mike slammed down next to Chuck and watched the comm screen wiggle and flicker in front of them. Just a little more...

Mike and Chuck both screamed as soon as they saw hair. “DUTCH!!!”

Dutch, very unprepared for a video call out of the blue, jumped right the hell out of frame with a yelp. He was at the garage, and from the look of the big screen in the background and the collection of snacks, he was... having a pizza party with Julie, Texas, and Jacob.

The detail did not escape Chuck.

“Is that Rock Band? You're playing ROCK BAND?!” Chuck wailed. “I got sold into slavery and nearly got my mouth sewn shut by a princess with a blond fetish and YOU'RE PLAYING ROCK BAND?! AND ON MY SAVE FILE!!!”

Dutch took up the frame fast, as did Julie, Texas, and then Jacob in a big hurry. Dutch said, “Waitwaitwaitwait wait back all of that up. Unpack it.”

Julie cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you look like you're about to hold up Shining Time Station?”

“No time!” Mike cut in. “Get ROTH, get over here, and get us airlifted out of his hellhole _pronto!”_

Texas leaned in a little closer. “No wait I wanna hear about the princess wit-”

“Guys, I am not fooling around here!!” Mike shouted. “We're STILL on the acid island! Neither of us have eaten in over ten hours! I had to break Chuck out of a cage!”

“I'm gonna send some plans your way for a field dampener.” Chuck pulled up a keyboard and hammered away at the virtual keys. “It'll be enough to keep ROTH from getting woozy out here, and you should be able to build it on the way if someone else drives. Please, I am begging you, _get here fast_! I don't wanna chance anyone-”

Mike's blood ran cold. He could hear it. His breath stopped along with Chuck's as it echoed up from the bottom floor.

Screaming. Not just screaming, _shrieking_ , a primal enraged noise which tore from a throat like a wild beast and came back stronger with every new breath. It reached up 20 floors and through to the roof. Chuck's voice spilled out of his mouth in a desperate attempt to escape without him, and he only managed a hoarse whimper.

“ _It's her_!” Chuck pleaded. “ _She knows!_ ”

Dutch ordered, “Texas, you're driving. Julie get the medical gear. ROTH, BUST A MOVE, BUDDY! YOU'RE GOING INTO THE FIELD!”

The floor under their feet was shaking. A rumbling stampede sounded up from below, an ocean of people moving along creaking floors, and to Mike's horror, Chuck's transmitter started to bounce. He could nearly see the parabolic wiggle of the roof as it hopped up once, twice, and then shattered on the third bounce. Their signal was gone, and the little manager was still shrieking, and he could hear all if it through-

Mike gasped. “I LEFT THE DOOR OPEN!”

“You what?!”

Below, somewhere, a floor must have collapsed. There was a deafening crack of splintering wood and a mass roar of people in agony, overlaid by that demonic shrieking getting louder and louder. It rippled through the entire Motorplex with a kick that sent the two completely off their feet with a powerful push. Mike crossed the floor in three steps and slammed the door shut, and Chuck was right behind him to throw himself against it.

“I let in a draft!!!” Mike realized. He could feel the ground warping under his feet. The line of the acid lake in the distance bobbed in and out of sight past the edge of the roof. “The smell- it must've got in and it woke everybody up-”

“I-it's okay!” Chuck assured him. “They're all downstairs, they won't look for us up here!”

“Actually,” Mike admitted, “They chased me all the way up here earlier today...”

“So this is now the FIRST place they'd look.” Chuck huffed and leaned harder against the door. “Okay, we can't panic, everybody's coming to rescue us-”

The shrieking was getting closer, and loud enough to make out words. Licky-Lips had nearly shouted her voice raw screaming “ **THIEF! THIEF!!!** ”

“-and that's good, and that's okay, _and I think I'm gonna panic now_ -”

Chuck would need something to concentrate on, to get him out of that panic attack. Mike jerked his head back to the pieces of the transmitter. “Try to get that back together. I can hold them off here.”

“They're already on the way!” Chuck argued. “I'm not letting you take them all on by yourself!”

“It's a choke point!” Mike took one of Chuck's shoulders and shoved. “If I need backup, I'll call you in! Go!”

He pushed Chuck away just in time, too. The doorknob was starting to jiggle, and each bodily impact against the other side rocked through his shoulders. Mike dug his feet into the roof and held tight as he got his staff out. Hold them off as long as he could this way, only break out the moves once there were too many to keep back.

He had the plan all laid out in his mind, until an arm burst through the roof and grabbed his ankle.

Mike shouted every swear he could think of and stabbed his staff down into the floor, losing the door and falling backwards. Instincts kept him on his feet, bashing the faces of the solid wall of Shoppers who flooded out of the doorway. They stunned easy, fell in single hits just for the next one to mindlessly climb over them in an ever-higher wall of meat. The worst part was the floor. Shoppers seethed under the floor, pressing and punching against the roof below. A few strong ones got their hands through the thin layer of drywall that passed for a ceiling, but Mike could handle that. No, it was the random rolling and rocking of the floor under his feet. It was like standing on a tarp on the lake. It was frankly making him seasick, and Mike's steps started to falter.

Heat rushed past his ear, and a manager fell backwards screaming against a ball of plasma.

Mike laughed and swung back into the fray. “Chuck, you're the best!”

“KEEP HITTING THEM!” Chuck shouted from behind his targeting screen. “We're losing ground!”

“I have them cornered-” Mike's foot sunk into the floor and came just barely came back out of it through the sea of grasping fingers. “Oh you mean literally!”

“YES I MEAN LITERALLY!”

“Have I mentioned-” Mike jumped back from a too-close hand and smacked the flat end of his staff into a green-vested belly. “-that I hate this place? More than I can put into words? We got an ETA?”

“I can't keep track of time like this!” Chuck answered. Another plasma bolt fired, but Mike didn't see it. He dared a look over at Chuck and found him shooting down at his feet at hands coming out of the floor. Mike was over at Chuck's side in a flash, beating the hands away from Chuck and stomping on them where they were close enough.

He could just barely feel it. He wasn't sure how they could see him from below the floor, but all the Shoppers converged on where he and Chuck were standing, and the Motorplex started to lean. Chuck yelped and grabbed onto him for dear life, and Mike hooked an arm around him and ran them over to the other side of the roof. The shift was immediate. The floor surged behind them, sprouting hands at random while more Shoppers poured out of the door and shoved at their fallen comrades to get to them.

“I hate this!” Chuck wailed. “I hate this!”

Mike scanned the roof for something, anything, that could help. Damn this boring flat roof, nothing on it except the end of the stairwell-

The stairwell had a metal roof! Mike hooked his arm behind Chuck and vaulted them up onto the little island. The corrugated metal held the hands at bay, as small as it was, but he could feel the nails attaching it to the building straining under the force of all the people beneath.

He bought them maybe a minute.

This probably wasn't the bed idea he could have had.

Mike had stranded them on top of a twenty story building, with only a sheet of metal between them and hundreds of people at the beck and call of a furiously angry amateur surgeon.

“Chuck...” Mike swallowed hard. His hand stayed clamped tight around Chuck's waist. “I screwed up bad.”

Chuck returned the grip and pulled close to him. “Mikey...”

“And if anything happens to us-”

Mike froze. Chuck was asking him what he was going to say, but he couldn't answer. Everything was happening all at once. He could see ROTH swooping down from above, arms out, ready to catch him. He could feel arms at his pants legs, and his eyes darted down to catch a flash of blond hair framing a fat, greasy, furiously red face. His center of balance suddenly shifted as the metal buckled out, pitching him and Chuck forwards.

Making his decision fast, he pocketed his staff, wrapped Chuck up in both his arms, and leaped backwards.

It took all his strength to make the jump and clear the edge of the building. He didn't usually make jumps where he couldn't see the ground below him. All he had to look up into was Chuck's face, half obscured by dumb ducky print. His eyes mirrored back everything he was feeling: good healthy sense of terror, the odd distance from reality that an adrenaline overdose caused, confusion. It all cleared up in a hurry as thin-fingered hands clamped down on their shoulders and pulled them up, away, and out from the reach of the Motorplex building. Chuck, holding tight onto him, started to manically laugh like he did during crazy high jumps. Mike grabbed tight onto one of ROTH's arms and pulled out of joy! They were safe!

Mike twisted to get one last good look back at the Motorplex before they left that stupid building forever. The Shoppers had all gathered on edge of the rooftop, watching them leave. He could make out the faint outline of Manager Tony, with little manager Maggie running out of sight through the throng behind him. Mike kicked at the air in spite while Chuck flipped them off with both hands. “THAT'S WHAT YOU GET, YOU BUNCH OF CREEPS! JUST WAIT 'TIL WE COME BACK AND TEAR THIS WHOLE PLACE DOWN!”

“Good job, ROTH!” Chuck called up to their hero. “I am so proud of you right now!”

ROTH chirped and bobbed. Dutch's quick-built field dampener, made to Chuck's speedy specs, made him glow faintly blue in the light of Motorcity. He flew with an obvious ease that he hadn't been able to do before, and he deployed a few extra hands to gently pat Mike and Chuck on their heads, assuring them that they were homeward bound. Mike chuckled and turned back to the Motorplex to throw up some deuces of his own.

Maggie was leveling a shotgun at them.

The muzzle flashed orange, and within an instant, ROTH had lost his blue. They all started to drop.


	8. Chapter 8

Chuck screamed.

“ROTH! Are you okay?!” Mike grabbed onto ROTH's little arms with both hands and pulled up. He expected bullet holes, or a giant gouge out of ROTH's frame, something horrible. All he saw were the little shattered bits of the field dampener falling off ROTH's frame in pieces, along with little flecks of orange. They dropped with dry little pops off of Chuck's head. Mike gasped. “Rubber bullets!”

Rubber bullets bounced off of ROTH with another roar of shotgun fire. Little manager Maggie was a damn good shot, landing the hit just below the bot's eye. ROTH squealed in distress and struggled to gain altitude. All he managed was slowing their freefall, and the ground was still coming up fast.

“THIEF!” Maggie manager was screamed from the roof. “MY PROPERTY! NO RETURNS!”

Mike grabbed for Chuck's shoulder and shouted, “ROTH, bring us back to the boat! We'll get out that way! Go tell the guys where to find us!”

ROTH pitched hard to the side, and Mike worried for a flash of a second before he realized they were swinging towards the boat. Chuck took in the huge piles of junk on either side, with the tiny little plastic tub sitting right in the middle.

“Wow...” he whimpered. “I'm worth a lot.”

Mike took the little opportunity for levity. “You're priceless, buddy.”

The relief was short lived. The Motorplex started to rumble all over again, and when Mike checked the roof line, he saw nothing. They were coming down for them in a big hurry. The building started to shake from within, shedding huge hunks of its outer walls. They dropped into the plastic beach below with vicious, noisy crunches and bounced into the acid, where they immediately started to dissolve into foam and dust. The boat rocked dangerously in the waves.

They needed to hurry. As soon as their feet touched ground, Mike and Chuck shoved ROTH into the air and started running. Even this was painful; the fumes from the acid were even stronger than before. Mike could barely see through the tears pooling in his eyelids, and he started to wonder if they had enough air to- no he couldn't think like that right now, they could make it, they had to make it.

“Untie the rope!” Mike ordered.

“On it!” Chuck answered.

Mike jumped in first, holding the boat steady while Chuck made fast work of the knot. He barely waited until Chuck's was fully inside before giving the rope a hard yank. The boat bucked forward rather than moving, and Mike yelped as acid splashed against the sides and came close to landing inside their raft.

“Just go slow, Mike!” Chuck told him. “Steady and slow! They can't follow us!”

He hated this. Chuck's hands landed next to his, and they fell into a rhythm. One, two, three, four, short little tugs that inched the boat off the plastic beach and towards the metal shell covering the acid lake. Behind them, more pieces of building were falling, bouncing, sinking into the acid and coming up sizzling, rocking the dingy from behind.

Chuck checked behind them, always analyzing even during their getaway. “Those upper levels probably aren't built to handle that much weight. Combine it with all the footsteps stomping around inside, the whole thing's probably gonna collapse on itself- oh no oh NO NO MIKE THEY _ARE_ AFTER US!”

“They're what?!”

Chuck took the rope while Mike turned around to see for himself. Shoppers, almost all of them managers in their vests, were pouring out of the front door. Every one of them were carrying their beds. Those weird not-actually-beds Mike had seen them sleeping in- the kayaks, the wash tubs, garden planters, even oversized paint buckets- had all been plucked out of their nooks. Managers jumped in and paddled with spoons, signs, cookie tins, anything, and they were gaining ground.

“Okay maybe we can go a little faster!” Mike got his hands back onto the rope. “Count it out with me, Chuck!”

Chuck shouted the rhythm in a nervous squeal- “onetwothreefourgodOhgodMikeplease”- and kept the boat just far enough ahead of the shoppers. Mike chanced a glance back; that lip-licking freak and her father were right at the head of the pack, jointly rowing a plastic canoe. The others were faltering, stuck in containers that weren't meant to be seaworthy. Some of them had lost half their paddles to the lake, others were drifting to the side rather than moving forward.

Manager Tony caught his gaze and pointed a threatening finger. “You are in violation of our terms of agreement! Your property is forfeit! You will work to pay off the damages!”

Licky-lips paddled as hard as she could with one arm, the other one trying to load the shotgun that she had pinched between her legs. The exertion was tiring her out, and her chin and cheeks were sleeked with drool from her foaming, frantic panting.

One of the managers, at the edge of the fleet, overpaddled and tipped over. The guy went completely under.

Mike's gut ran cold.

The guy came up red, screaming, _sizzling_ -

Chuck jolted. “What was that?!”

Mike's head snapped back to the front. They were getting close to the walls now. “NOTHING just keep going don't look!”

Chuck didn't have to look, his imagination filling in the gaps. The screams were still coming, hardly drowned out- drowned!- by the frantic splashing behind them. “Oh god one of them capsized oh god Mikey what do we do?! We can't just leave him there!”

“I know we can't, but-” Mike dared a look over his shoulder, and Maggie was leveling the shotgun. “CHUCK!”

He barely got an arm over Chuck to pull him down before the shot rang out. The rubber bullets punched through a metal support in front of them, and it buckled, and the entire shell around the acid lake shifted hard to the left. It sent out a wave that rolled Chuck and Mike high enough to touch the ceiling of the wall with their shoulders, and behind them came the telltale sound of splashing and screams and foam rising up from below. Mike held tight to the metal for stability- the dry ceiling untouched by the lake- and checked behind them. A few of the managers had pulled themselves back onto their boats, and to his horror, they were still coming after them. They paddled with their burned, still-fizzing arms, and only those closest to shore were daring to sail back to safety on the island.

Licky-lips shrieked like a toddler: raw frustration at painful sheer high volume. She and Manager Tony were untouched by the acid, unbothered by their people falling and melting behind them, just _angry_ that they couldn't have them.

Mike swore to himself to screw this whole place, and he grabbed handfuls of the wall. “Just go!”

Chuck didn't need reminding. With remaining rope now mostly soaked and dissolving, they only had the metal framework to pull themselves forward. It went only a little faster than pulling by the rope, but it was enough to gain a little ground. Without the rope as a guide or the eyelet hooks to spot, the Shoppers behind them started losing ground in the cave maze. Mike stopped seeing them about five minutes in.

He could still hear them. He could hear them everywhere, when their rafts cracked in half and the acid made contact with their skin. He could hear the bubbling, echoing from every direction. It made his head swoon more than the fumes. Chuck, beside him, was going paler and paler, shrinking into himself and losing his whimpers as the screams grew louder.

They stopped at the low ceiling tunnel. Mike had forgotten about this. It had dropped a few inches down after the framework shifted. He tested the stability of the metal by tugging it, and it wiggled in his hands. There would be no climbing over this obstacle.

Chuck gulped. “Oh no...”

“Can we still make it?” asked Mike. “We had a little room when we went through the first time.”

“We did, but- Mike we'd have to push the boat down into the lake! We'd literally be scraping the bottom of the roof with maybe a quarter-inch clearance between us and the skin melting-”

The metal framework wiggled. Behind them, the Managers were snapping at each other in hushed tones, and the harsh shunk of a cocked shotgun cracked through the air.

Chuck choked on his own words. “Oh god we don't have a choice oh god oh god-”

“Just hold onto me, bro, I've got you.”

To think, the first time they had done this, they had been cracking jokes. It had been comfortable and quiet. Now, folded up into the bottom of the boat, arms pushing up into the metal criss-cossing over their heads, creeping along the acid lake at a snail's pace to keep the acid at bay while nearly at level with the fumes themselves, Mike had nearly sworn off scavenging for good. Nothing in his entire life could be worth the pain they had been through today- were still going through now. It could have been someone else finding the Shoppers and being kidnapped. It could have been a day with the entire gang there to support each other and break out of the foul building when things got sticky.

Somewhere back behind them, the Managers had hit the same wall. He could feel it, literally, the impact of their canoe against the framework rattled through the metal and into his palms. He and Chuck were nearly clear, and with a laugh of relief, he realized that the canoe rode too high in the water for them to squeak underneath the frame like he and Chuck had.

He dared to whisper. “I think we're safe after this.”

Chuck coughed before he spoke, and his voice trembled. “You think so?”

It had to be the fumes. Mike was already a little light-headed, but he had been trained to resist conditions like this. Chuck hadn't, and Mike gave his friend a quick bump to his shoulder to keep grounded. “Almost. Just a little more. She can't reach you now.”

**“No!”**

Mike trembled. Her voice felt so close, and the metal shook when she spoke. She yelled back to Mike, and her words were rough and raw from the constant screaming. **“Your payment went through! He is my property! Mine to customize! No returns!”**

Mike had a retort on his tongue, about how he definitely wasn't, but before he could speak-

“YOU!!!” Chuck screamed. “Don't get to TELL ME!!! What to DO!!!”

Mike beamed. “Couldn't have said it better.”

From the other side, Texas yelled, “Who the hell are you talking to?”

Mike didn't think he would ever be this happy to hear Texas ask a question. He shouted back, “We lost the rope! Did ROTH make it?!”

“He's already fixed up!” Dutch answered. “I'm sending him to come get you, just keep going!”

“Kick it into top gear, Chuck!” Mike planted his hands into the metal and pulled. The boat creeped out of the tunnel by the last little bit, freeing their head and shouders. “Just a little more-”

Maggie gave one last, ragged, painful shriek, and everything shifted down. Wound tight with fear, Mike and Chuck had adrenaline alone to thank for the jump they made out of the boat and into the metal bars above. They climbed fast and without direction, only up, as the entire place started coming down around them. Something happened- something must have pulled sharp at the supports and finally cracked them, pulling them down on top of the little plastic boat and pinning it all the way down to the bottom of the lake. Mike could see faint lights through the gaps in the frame from Motorcity outside, and he reached down to Chuck to hold his hand and haul him up into the higher rafters. Chuck kept pace with him steady, but the more they climbed, the faster the metal below them sank into the lake.

“Keep going up!” Julie shouted from the shore. “We see you! ROTH's waiting for you, just don't give up!”

“Texas has the car running!” Texas called. “Just a little more!”

They were only a few feet away from the outside. ROTH was hovering, arms wrapped around a beam of the metal shell in a vain attempt to keep it from sinking. Mike had Chuck's arm in a vice grip, knuckles white and pained. He could make it. Just those last few inches, he could make it.

Mike's foot slipped.

Without missing a breath, Chuck caught him from below. He could only hold on, he didn't have the muscle to climb like Mike did, but his grip never wavered while Mike found his footing again and pulled them up the rest of the way. Each with an arm around the other, Mike and Chuck grabbed onto ROTH with all that was left of their strength. The little bot pulled up, let go of the metal, and backed away.

Mike gave the acid lake one last look.

Below his feet, he could see it. The plastic canoe the Managers had tailed them in was pinned under the rubble, along with the remains of Manager Tony, abandoned in the boat to be pulled under.

She was right at their feet.

She had her knees hooked around the metal bars, woven in tight for leverage, and with a roar she threw her arms around both their legs. ROTH whirred and popped in disgust, wrenching side to side to get Chuck out of her grip. It twisted Mike's shoulders, turned Chuck sharply enough to pop his spine, faltered their own grip, and she still was not letting go.

“What is wrong with you?!” Mike yelled. “Let go of that thing! Do you WANT us all to die?!”

The framework creaked, buckled, cracked in the middle, pitched down into the acid lake and brought all four of them down with it. She kept her grip solid even as her legs went into the lake, her eyes blazing and yet horridly empty and vacant. Mike, for a split instant, didn't see a person behind that face. He only felt his gaze bounce off that solid wall of jealousy and possessiveness.

Then, in a beautifully unfitting tension-cutting moment, Texas shot her in the face.

Mike and Chuck flew out of her grip like a rubber band. Their eyes squeezed shut against the sight of her falling back into the lake, and they could only blindly grope for Dutch and Julie's arms when ROTH set them down directly in Stronghorn's back seat.

“We ready?!” Texas roared. “Everybody buckle the hell in! TEXAAAAAS!”

ROTH barely got inside and shut Stronghorn's roof before Texas punched the accelerator. Her engines fired.

The little spark of heat from her tailpipes ignited the lake, and Stronghorn went flying.

Crashes were never fun, but it was nothing the Burners weren't used to. Even all crammed into a single car that was currently housing a big flying plastic robot, nobody was hurt. Jostled, maybe, and Chuck was starting to cry, and everybody was upside down, but nobody was hurt.

“Well...” Texas admitted. “That sucked. But hey, we're outside Hector's Mexican food stand, so score one for Texas! Hwoo!”

Julie pulled the masks off Chuck and Mike's faces slowly, obviously regretting touching the slimy cloth. She let it drop to the ceiling, away from her hair that had curled into a pretty little pile under her head. “So, you gonna tell us what happened back there, or-”

“NO!” Chuck shouted. “NO. I don't relive those memories ever again!”

“Dude, that place is going _up_.” Dutch shrunk away from the window. “And I heard people screaming and stuff! Are you sure we don't need firefighting equipment or something?”

“And where's all our cool swag?!” Texas demanded. “Come on, you give us a teaser trailer about being sold on some kinda nerd black market to a princess or something, don't bring us any souvenirs, and now we don't even get a story? This is bogus!”

“Guys...” Mike took a long breath. He had to compose his thoughts. “... I smell terrible.”

Julie winced. “Tell me about it.”

“YES!” Texas shouted. “THAT is what Texas is trying to get them to do!”

Chuck, hanging upside down with his face turning red, started to laugh, and that laugh was so sweet and innocent and relieved that it brought a wide smile to Mike's face. Even while the rest of the Burners were looking at them funny, Chuck kept giggling. “Oh wow I missed this...”

“You were gone for a day!” Dutch argued.

“Okay guys seriously can we please flip the car over?” asked Chuck. “I feel like I'm gonna throw up.”

“I'll tell you all about it at home,” Mike assured them. “And somebody tell Jacob to run a bath. And order pizza. A LOT of pizza. I don't feel too good either.”

All of his drive to go back to the island, that burning hatred of the place, was fading fast. It was exhaustion catching up to him, pure and simple, and after a long bath at the garage, Mike would find himself falling asleep on the couch in front of his pizza and a group of very tired, very grumpy Burners. The Motorplex and the people inside, on that crumpling island inside a crumbling shell, were something to worry about once he was full, rested, and centered again.

The morning he slept, shadows passed over the island, and a fleet of unfamiliar feet landed on its shores and broke down the doors with a heavy smack to its glass. They entered the Motorplex to a people cowering in the dark, shivering behind heavy boxes and carefully feeding the hungry dogs that had been left behind. Only one dared to approach the tall figures and speak to them.

“Thank you for shopping at Motorplex. New hires?”

They picked up the language quickly. The leader spoke in calm, even tones. “No. We are here to buy up your remaining assets and merge them into ours. You will be given new jobs and relocated to our main office.” The leader took a corner of their tired rags in her hand. “Your wages will be increased, as will your benefits.”

The Shoppers, puzzled and delighted, muttered to themselves about benefits. They stepped forward, one by one, and left the island in the dead of night with only their most treasured possessions tied to their backs.

When the Burners returned two days later, armed and ready, they found a half-collapsed building on an empty island encased in thick, green, pulsing vines.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No plans for a sequel at this time. Let me know if you liked it! Or even if you didn't.


End file.
